Last night, I was not in the forums. Too tired from uni, I decided to go to sleep early, and thus having one of the best sleeps I have had in a while.
I wake up today, and then I find out we had ourselves another bit of drama. Well actually, another drama that tops the Cobra, non-animania cosplay topic movements, and others which I totally forgot.
Looking at the posts that were deleted (yes I am a mod, and I have the privilege to see what posts were deleted), I can see what all the fuss was all about. Guess its can be hard at times to be moderator sometimes, seeing insults, arguments going towards members, the staff, non-members.
While I can be skeptical sometimes how the admins warn, suspend or ban people due to something that doesn't have some relation to the rules, I can see why they have decided to suspend two members. Either through rules, personal experience, or just sick and tired of the same members doing it over and over again, IN MY OPINION the suspensions were carried out due to the swearing and insults at other people (which I don't know who they are at this time I will admit). Considering it is a PG forum (which is never taken into note by most members considering that we are all grown up and have our bit of swear words and immaturity once in a while), I guess our admins saw this and have their reason to suspend the members. And then from there, it went downhill.
Arguments, insults, this and that, its the usual drama I have seen in the past, and we get our comments of saying that this is a debacle, the rules are total bullshit, this and that, etc.
Lots of people aren't happy about the suspension of these two members, and while I do not side with groups of people when arguments happen (don't care if its admins or some people i know personally), I have to say I would have rather given a warning or two, and tried to reason with them what not to do, so at least the problem would try not to spread among other members. But I guess what they did happened at the wrong time when one of the admins was around the area.
Admins and moderators have different ways of dealing with members when it comes to problems that arise in the forums. Some can be straightforward and enforce a ban, others will give warnings via pms. For me, I send a pm, or give them a kind reminder over the topic to say what not to do. When I became a moderator, I had a special set of guidelines I must follow, but after saying this, I don't think this is not followed effectively.
The rules... the rules are a bitch to understand. There are loopholes and other crap which I do want to fix. The incident last night has shown that the rules of the forums were another failure and its something I hate seeing. The reason is because although it can't be seen when we read it, we go further into it and mention how far does the boundaries of this rule go. Thus we have these arguments saying that they have/have not broken the rules.
Going back to the incident, where do I stand in all of this? Its really hard to say. Once an admin does the act of suspension/ban, I really have limited appeal against the decision. The time when the non-animania cosplay topics were moved to an inconvenient location, I had tried to ask if we can move them back, but it failed (So now I am lobbying for a new cosplay section where it would be convenient for people to access). Once its done, its done. I really can't do much after that. I just have limited powers of deleting, editing posts, sending warnings, enforce locking of topics, etc. That's all.
I have no intention of making enemies with anyone with the forums, I always try to be friendly with them in anyway. If I did something offensive, I would try to at least tell them what I did wrong, and try and reason with them.
I am a moderator, but like my fellow members, I am also one of them. I have fun and good times with some of them in many topics, even if I may not be a close friend of them in person. So when something wrong happens to a member that most others would dispute about, I will try to at least ask the top whether there are some things that need to change, or dispute it.
Thats it from me. Entirely my own opinion. The 7 day suspension is something I cannot change now, and I am sorry to say we will just wait it out.
But general rule or not, in my opinion, one thing should be at least followed in Animania Forums:
Keep your personal problems out of the forums. And if it can't be done, at least keep your rant to an appropriate level.
Renato signing off, going to pay attention to his lecturer again. >_>
4 comments:
My core problem with this all was not the fact that she was banned. That makes me annoyed, but there is nothing I can do about that.
It's the fact that why she was was not explained, even to her. And all traces of what was happened were deleted. If we hadn't been making a fuss of it, no one would have known in the morning unless they came across one of Tim or Ani's posts and noticed the detention under their name. As I said in my topic, I believe there should be transparency in the high-level moderation, just like there is meant to be in politics (even if that has failed) and the legal system.
Ya just taken a look at that topic that you made now. I think I missed that part where they had a right to know why they got banned.
At the moment, I'm just talking to the mods and higher ups regarding these issues, and see what we can do. It's quite a nasty job, but I'm trying.
Thank you. It means a lot. =)
Keep in mind that while there are grown up people on the forums, the majority of them do have the mentality of a 13yr old or under.
I guess if you put it this way, in every forum there's always gonna be someone that wants to be rebellious and set their foot into everything mods and admins do. Some go as far as pretending to be mods. When you are behind a computer screen, it's easier to develop multiple personalities. I used to talk to myself on forums out of boredom.
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