[Raion]

Hello Everyone!

I wanted to inform everyone of a new policy (rule updates to follow) regarding our moderation policies. 

In the past many of us were without ways to give users a cooldown if they get out of hand, forcing us to have a heavy hand and either warn or issue sitewide bans for infractions. 

That policy ends today. 

In the future, staff are going to instead use a new tool:

Threadbanning. This basically means we can prohibit users from replying to a thread if they misbehave, but it will enable a user to keep contributing elsewhere. It, and eventual category/subforum bans will be possible to deal with bad actors. In general, I hope to never use this to shut down/censor users, but rather to give those users a cooldown if things are getting personal. 

By instituting this, we want to reduce the need for heavy moderation on users. I haven't had to, since the partnership of the other staff issue bans that often. Mostly to people we ascertained to be trolls. But now, sitewide bans, temporary or not, will be the last resort to only deal with continually disruptive users. 

Anyways, with all that said I will be updating wiki pages and training the other admins on use of the new tool. Along with this, I want to thank everyone for continuing to support us. We are doing well and I'm proud to be here. 

-- Raion.

[vishnu]

Finer grained tools are always better than sledge hammers. Well, almost always. I loved the TV show:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090525/ 😁

[Raion]

In general I would say that we have made a lot of strides to be better for the community but there's never a stopping point!

[Raion]

The thread ban plug-in has been updated so that it will now PM you if you have been threadbanned, this is mostly to help engage with the staff. Moderators will automatically have logs about these things so there will be accountability.