Ok. Well, look, from reading your posts you are rather too trusting of other people not to act the idiot. If I could have a server consisting just of the people who are on here regularly, I'd happily do without admins. With access to the general public, no.

Fair enough. One thing to keep in mind is that KGS does have a censor feature. So even if you don't have admins, and there is someone that is spamming or bugging you personally, you can always censor them.

In this manner, you can act as your own admin. Does someone bother you? Censor them. This requires effort by users, sure. But it allows for flexibility in tolerance. Someone that appreciates what someone has to say can hear them, and someone that does not does not have to.

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be immersed

Kirby, I've avoided using this example because, well, I don't like it but: I've had to remove child porn from public forums being posted by a demented user who had harrassed us for many years and who kept escalating things. Or at least, we thought it was him, we couldn't be sure and the police couldn't pin it down to any individual either. People do things which aren't "censorable." Someone flooding, fine, I can ignore them, no big deal. A very small minority on the other hand will post up images or links to images to things that cannot be unseen. This isn't censor territory. Really. You do not want people clicking that link, you want an admin in there asap to remove it, and nuke the account and IP as fast as possible. There is a line that almost everyone can agree one. Most people like to pretend that no one will cross it, I've seen people do it more than once though.

Sorry to hear about your experience. I guess such behavior is certainly possible. The current "ban bar" is much lower than that (eg. discussing something "off topic" for "too long" can constitute a warning, and then a ban), so it's hard to make the same judgement universally.

I can see your point, that in extreme cases, there may be things that cannot be unseen. Though, I would imagine that this is the exception rather than the norm.

If we come back to the analogy about cops, there may be serial killers out there for which cops are necessary. But we don't put everyone that's gotten a parking ticket up for the death penalty.

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be immersed

This was my question earlier. I think we both agree that there is a line, where we disagree is where the line should be. So we don't need to argue about whether bans are good things or not, just what people should be banned over no? (I've a feeling you and I would draw the lines fairly close together actually)

It's not, whether or not we need admins, because we do on that server. It's what they should be "actioning."

I don't know where the line is, and it doesn't matter if I do anyway - the admins will do what they want.

But to give a few examples, I don't think the items I mentioned (eg. "off-topic" kibitz, discussion in other languages, etc.) should be banned. I don't even think flooding needs to be banned. Anything that a user can censor without much pain does not need banning. When you ban for something that can easily be censored, you'll have a set of users that valued the content that was banned, and this is not worthwhile (whereas leaving to censor allows full flexibility in users seeing the content that they want).

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be immersed

Yeah, but I can also censor someone who verbally abuses me after a game (very rare) but we do want to discourage such behaviour with bans or some other form of sanction no?

Personally, I do not wish to have some sort of ban or sanction for this type of behavior - who should decide what gets punished? When I disagree with you on the forum, does it mean I'm abusing you? Some sensitive people might say yes.

These sanctions assume some sort of model behavior, for which I don't think there is a definition that matches everyone's intuition. Supposedly this is what the TOS is for, but we know that bans are not correlated directly with the TOS (except under the blanket idea that you must listen to admins).

Anyway, for me, in the example you provided just now, censoring is sufficient. There is no reason to "punish" the user.

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be immersed

There's rather a difference between me disagreeing with you and me telling you to "F*** off you stupid Yank c*** and go f***ing shove your opinions up your a***" no? One is rather more likely to offend and distress than the other and we might prefer more polite exchanges and want to encourage this?

One fix that I think users seem to forget about is the Censor feature. I've only used it a few times, but aside from a short annoyance the problem goes away until they change accounts.

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"It has cost me much, but I have learned... Lemon need not squeeze lemon to survive..!"

There are definitely reasons for banning. If you were to go to a Chinese go forum and you start making political statements against the powers that be, you risk the shutdown of the server and criminal liabilities to the owner of the site. Would you still argue that such would not warrant a ban on such a server by those in charge? And that you would merely censor them? If you were the owner of the site, would you merely wait for admins to take their time to do their job of just censoring unwanted content because you refuse to ban people as a principle?

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http://tchan001.wordpress.com
A blog on Asian go books, go sightings, and interesting tidbits
Go is such a beautiful game.

Sure, but we don't need to encourage by sanctions. I agree that such behavior could offend, but I'm not at user's mommy or daddy, so I don't see the need to punish them when the problem can be solved by a simple censor.

If we want to encourage good behavior, let's reward for being good instead of being heavy-handed when someone acts in a way we personally find to be disagreeable.

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be immersed

Anyway, I think I've made my viewpoint clear. Obviously, some disagree. But is there value in reiterating this so many times?

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be immersed

My latest example was not about the matter of items which the community dislikes and which should just be censored. It's about material whose very presence can threaten the existence of the community. Not exactly an reiteration, but rather showing that inaction or low level censoring of certain things could lead to criminal prosecution of the people who own and run the community. If the tolerance of the admins and owners of a community attracts a population of people who want to use the community for illegal underground purposes, then that would be a great loss for the community. As Boihdre points out with his example about angry people posting child porn, what happens if people who post such material finds the community tolerant to such postings and decide to flood the forum with such items. Would you still defend your position that they should not be banned while you are fleeing from the authorities who are after you for "promoting" such works because of your inaction?

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http://tchan001.wordpress.com
A blog on Asian go books, go sightings, and interesting tidbits
Go is such a beautiful game.

Disaster scenario #47: Admin Kirby! Lex Luthor has kidnapped Lois Lane and will blow up the world unless you BAN Superman from KGS, WILL YOU DO IT????

C'mon people, all the guy said was that he thinks admins should be more rather than less lenient when it comes to minor disturbances. It's his personal preference. Admins are volunteers who do a great job yada yada, yet sometimes their interpretation of the server rules causes more of a disturbance than the than the guy making a bad joke. He'd like them to be more lenient. You wouldn't. Basta.

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Patience, grasshopper.

Indeed, catching up on this thread I had high hopes that this thread might end amicably at this point:




Someone could mention that many communities prefer to use the "clone game" feature on high dan games so they have a real-time updating version of the game that they can discuss them however they see fit without having to worry about other people. What's more, they can even discuss variations in the game! I think that would end up as a pretty reasonable solution for everyone.

Instead, it continues on for another page and I see we've managed to turn this into "bombard Kirby with extreme situations" thread that I'm not sure what it's trying to achieve \=

It's not the common stuff that we need admins badly for (most admin work isn't really strictly needed usually) but the uncommon more nasty examples are why we need someone on almost all of the time that can delete, ban and so on. My argument was: There's a line we can all agree on, here's the worst example from my experience. Now we have a line we agree we need to police we're past "do we need admins?" and are onto "so what do we want them doing? which is where the real meat of the question is.

Some people need admins more than other. OTAH admins need to pay more attention to some people than to other.

What about creating an anarchy room where admins have no power at all and everyone can do what he wants?

wms would still be legally liable in many countries for what goes on in that room, so "anything you want" couldn't work but "almost anything" might.

You can do this today by creating a private room. Admins don't monitor private rooms.