My mistake. It was Dovster who said that. You quoted my response to his statement, and I inappropriately assumed you were agreeing with Dovster. However as a christian, I am (slightly) offended by the characterization that all christians (or any faith) believe necessarily that their faith may be superior to or more legitimate than others'. I know who MY Lord and Savior is, but I don't assume to know yours.
If one is called to worship a Kangaroo Bone, and another is called to worship Jesus, BOTH should follow their calling, and neither worshiper should feel superior. Superiority is for those being worshiped.

I just happened upon this thread for the first time, due to a link to it.

[Usually threads in ORP about thread closure are of secondary interest to me, because I know, understand, and follow the ToS.]

So now I understand why the moderators have been so edgy and walking on egg shells about reputation. :eek:

And what led to someone's "banning," presumably from this very thread.

Is that a lifetime decision? Has this power been delegated to the moderators?

Well, it looks like we still have two posters in this thread (am I allowed to mention their names) to represent the ever-diminishing Flyer Talk right wing. Perhaps the Presidential election season in OMNI will be full of unanimity after all! :)

Couple of things:

Reputation will never have any bearing on a moderator doing his "job".

Moderators have the ability to timeout members for breaking the rules. The "Disciple Policy" is the last paragraph on the TOS:


Only Randy hands out lifetime bans.

HTH

Sheesh, Sean replied to this already, why are we trying to create even more controversy :rolleyes:

With the risk of not following this thread completely, I will try to answer it as best as possible.

My answers are in blue ;)

All moderators have been given the authorization to give people timeouts. Unfortunately the timeouts are system wide, and not OMNI specific as in the old software.

Hope this helps ;)

"Disciple Policy"?
 

"Discipline Policy" perhaps?

Gotta be careful blindly accepting spell check recommendations. :D

Spell checker! I swear!

Or maybe Dov's Rapture is about to happen!!!

Discipline
 

Thank you Sean, and JFE (and all moderators).

It seems like the new bulletin board system has just enhanced the ability of moderators to impose discipline, which is both good and bad, and may deserve a thread of its own "Enhanced Discipline," so as not to get lost in the crowd. I'll leave that to those who know better.

I am relieved to learn that the new "banned" label includes the moderator-imposed 7- and 30-day suspensions. So my favorite reactionary who may have a bit of a temper problem might not be gone forever.

The reason I say this is that with the increased power of moderators comes increased responsibility. One of my favorite moderators, and I say this with utmost admiration and not an iota of sarcasm, seems also occasionally prone to flashes of temper -- we are all human, are we not? -- albeit not to the level, perhaps, that (temporarily?) cost the prickly Christian from Arizona his posting privileges.

Yet while moderators now have new disciplinary tools, the participation of some of them in concerted "Reputation" attacks shows that such power is not always used benignly. Indeed, it would appear that the "banned" member was the subject of an organized baiting campaign, not that the presumed "victim" is always the model of temperate response.

So what I am saying is that if there is any way to give moderators solely the ability to ban within a given forum, it should be implemented.

If not, perhaps we need a little more due process, given the ability of those who participate in the fray to impose sanctions against their very opponents.

It is a maxim of jurisprudence, "No man should be a judge in his own case." Of course our host can do whatever he wishes; he is not the Government. Yet the principle has natural law antecedents.

Given the intense sacrifices our moderators make on all our behalf, perhaps they should be entitled to periodic sabatticals from these tasks?

Term Limits for Moderators?

Again, I am not in the least anti-moderator, and might even aspire to a moderatorship myself someday if my time constraints will allow (like when my kids go to college in 8 years!), so I do not want this to turn into a round of moderator bashing with the usual anti-moderator folks piling on.

And if a one- or two- year break from moderation after three- or four- years of service would be deemed a "punishment" and deleteriously affect moderator recruitment and retention, it would obviously be counterproductive. Perhaps that, too, is fodder for another thread.

My primary point is that Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, and I trust Randy has, or will, fully take that into consideration.

Warm regards to all.


P.S. Sean, what is HTH? I've seen that used by several posters.

P.P.S. We do not want to encourage attacks on the moderation corps, just as in-court verbal attacks on a judge cannot form the basis for his recusal.

Likewise, when read in conjunction with any other thread in this forum, I by no means intend to accuse any particular moderator of picking a fight, seeking revenge, or using intellectually superior means to "get" an ideological opponent, nor do I mean any such implication.

That feature has been requested. From my limited correspondence with Randy, I think he's on the "total" time out side of the fence. "You are what you post" and misbehaving in say, OMNI, should have impacts on the "real" side of the board.

HTH = "Hope That Helps"

Agree absolutely. ^^^^

There is a way and it requires no software change.

All that need be done (with Randy's prior approval of course) is send someone a letter telling him he is not allowed to post in a particular forum for X amount of days (or even forever). If he does post during that time, no matter how harmless the letter, he will receive an automatic lifetime ban from all of FlyerTalk.

Well, IMHO that particular "victim" richly deserved being bounced!

He was another of those cowards who dings from hiding, not man enough to take responsibility for what he does.

Although I will admit that, so far as I know, he hasn't stooped to hiding behind someone else's handle, so I suppose he's not all bad.

At the risk of being redundant, I am going to repeat here what I have said more than once: Most, if not all, of the dings were unsigned -- and in the beginning even the blings were.

Every ding I sent out was unsigned. Every ding I received (including one from an Omni mod) was unsigned. (I also received an unsigned grey box from a second Omni mod.) As long as that was the accepted practice -- and assuming that no flaming messages were attached -- there was nothing wrong with it. It was very much like the secret ballot. You voted on whether or not you liked a posting.

It is highly unfair to condemn one person for what was the general practice.

If you want to condemn anything (in addition to signing fake names) condemn the obviously organized gang bangs. Sean was the recipient of one of them. I was another (6 dings on April 3,4, and 5 -- one of them for advising that the new software works faster during non-peak hours).

I am certain that Sean and I were not the only recipients. And if you don't want to condemn them for actually doing the gang bangs, at least condemn them for doing it so obviously. That was plain amateurish! ;)

Well, it wasn't "general practice" among the people I respect, and it certainly wasn't general practice with me!

And to compare it with "a secret ballot" is (IMHO) utter nonsense. No one (with a few exceptions) is holding him/herself out for "election" and indeed some folks had to go back to posts made long before the reputation "feature" even existed in order to find a post with which to ding their target.

The only similarity to a "secret ballot" is the similarity to black-balling, another practice I find truly reprehensible and cowardly (although, so far as I know, I have never been a victim of such practice). Even in those cases, however, the victim has affirmatively put him/herself up for something (membership in a club, whatever).

People were not "voting on whether or not you liked a posting" - you can do that by rating a thread. The point and effect of the "reputation" feature is not to rate a particular post, but to rate the poster. If it were simply to rate the post, you could click on some icon in the post to find out how it was rated (there is such a software capability - to rate individual posts).

No, the point is to bless or dump on the individual him/herself.

Now, you may argue that at first the raters didn't realize that if they didn't put their handle in the box next to the "rating" it wouldn't be known to the recipient. The first "reputation" I left, I figured that the recipient would know it was from me since I was signed in, just as a post I made while signed in carried my handle. Someone (and I remember who it was) wound up getting an anonymous blessing from me.

But that innocence could not possibly have survived the first "hit", plus or minus, received by the rater him/herself. When he (I'm getting tired of the "he/she" nonsense, and reverting to the unstressed usage - the reader is invited to mentally fill in anything he deems politically correct) first saw reputation feed-back on himself, he had to notice that it was not automatically signed. (I doubt anyone didn't look to see who had said what about him - and that includes the folks who then turned the "reputation" feature off.) From that moment on, any anonymous dinging was done with full knowledge, intent, and malice. :td:

But each to his own taste.