Unfortunately there is entropy and the unfailing move toward it.
So after how many years of working well along each other two guys i both respect kick each other in public view - what a bloody shame. Takes a bite out of my quality of life. Entropy or whatever… :s 
[quote=“ironlady”]The issue at hand is not the banning. The issue is whether the admin, as an individual, has the right to, or should, impose additional unstated rules of behavior on a longtime member in this particular situation (wanting to access PMs).
My position is that the two are separate. The banning is a consequence of a certain action on the forum. The admin, IMHO, does not have the right to demand that the poster take one action, use a particular word, or whatever, to obtain his intellectual property (if you want to get legalistic) from the site.
What if the admin simply doesn’t like the person? How polite is polite? What if he says please but not thank you? What if he uses some word that the admin doesn’t like? What if the admin’s breakfast disagreed with him that day?
This is rule of man, not rule of law. Yes, the forum is not totally, 100% run by the rules, but IMHO matters concerning the forum should not degenerate into being handled based on one person’s emotional reaction. It is not the admin’s place to teach the poster how to live his life or how to speak – except insofar as the admin had (and exercised) the right to ban.[/quote]
I find myself agreeing. I’ve always thought bannings, if they needed to be done at all, should be agreed upon by more than one person. Actually, when I modded (however briefly), I advocated no punitive action at all, except in the most extreme caases. Mods should simply remove offending materials quietly. Bannings should be reserved for only the worst serial offenders.
[quote=“ironlady”]The issue at hand is not the banning. The issue is whether the admin, as an individual, has the right to, or should, impose additional unstated rules of behavior on a longtime member in this particular situation (wanting to access PMs).
My position is that the two are separate. The banning is a consequence of a certain action on the forum. The admin, IMHO, does not have the right to demand that the poster take one action, use a particular word, or whatever, to obtain his intellectual property (if you want to get legalistic) from the site.
What if the admin simply doesn’t like the person? How polite is polite? What if he says please but not thank you? What if he uses some word that the admin doesn’t like? What if the admin’s breakfast disagreed with him that day?
This is rule of man, not rule of law. Yes, the forum is not totally, 100% run by the rules, but IMHO matters concerning the forum should not degenerate into being handled based on one person’s emotional reaction. It is not the admin’s place to teach the poster how to live his life or how to speak – except insofar as the admin had (and exercised) the right to ban.[/quote]
Maoman has already practically admitted that his actions were not appropriate so there is no question of this being any sort of policy. He met up with somebody who was understandably angry and not using the kind of polite phrasing that people normally use when they are making a request of anybody. He got angry, acted really badly and has more or less apologized for it. Today of all days might be a good day to cut him a bit of slack.
The only outstanding issue that I can see is whether or not maoman remembered the issue that MM had with business numbers etc. and went ahead and banned him without warning anyway. MM apparently thinks that is what happened and that is why he used such a hostile tone and that is what started the downward spiral.
It’s all well and good to get angry, fight and then apologize but if there is an unresolved issue the aplology and make up things starts to feel pretty hollow shortly afterwards.
If maoman forgot about the issue of phone numbers and went ahead and banned MM that is one thing (they could chalk the whole thing up to experience, apologize to each other if they wanted and hopefully move on a little wiser) but if maoman provoked an angry response by consciously creating the possibility of screwing up MM’s working life and then responded like a petty tyrant when MM responded angrily afterwards, that is entirely another.
I hope the former was what happened. Maoman moderated “one” of my interactions badly as far as I can recall. This is a phenomenal site and he had a lot to with making it happen, obviously.
OK, but let’s all keep cool during this time of transition.
Let’s not turn this into some sort of demented Star Trek episode with Kirk fighting Spock!
Let’s BE COOL
A few weeks ago i posted a comment addressing exactly that issue in a thread similar to this one: and my view was then and is now that there is notihng wrong wth the owner of a BBS or the owner’s designated representative having complete control over the system, exactly like the kind of control people usually have over their living rooms.
But it seems that the tool that is available to manage user access is too coarse. I think what is needed is the option to selectively block a user’s access to a single forum or a certain group of forums. That way moderators could basically force people to cool down when warnings no longer work, and lsystemwide bannings can be left to the few cases where nothing else works. [quote=“Toasty”]bannings should be reserved for only the worst serial offenders.[/quote]
So you’re advocating that moderators should spend even MORE time than they already (voluntarily) do to clean up arbitrary shit and general trolling? Listen, I moderate six forums. Half of my day is spent on the flob. Are you saying that I should spend even more of my time “quietly removing offending materials”? You try it for a few days and see how tiresome it becomes.
I’m not referring to the MM/MM debacle here. Just trying to put things into perspective.
I agree. If your work is THAT important to you, you will ASAP copy the info or whatever and not let it hang on someone’s mercy. What if the site crashes??? And why should the guy he is so bent on pissing off, be responsible for his work.
I know for a fact, that it was not the first time muzha man behaved badly with Mao Man. And Almas John, all this thing about ‘being the bigger man’, I think Anthony grew as big as he could in this fiasco. It would be great if the other person (in these kind os situations) could be told to get off the dirt. What happens usually (and I am generalising), is that the good are always told to be better, where as the quirky, high strung, insolent ones get way coz ‘they are like that only’. We should expect better from them and in this instance a simple ‘Please’ would not have hurt Muzha Man. 
No, another Forumosan sent some important info to him by PM, and he couldn’t access it when he was suspended.
And he was supposed to deliver that precisely how – when he was being hung up on, and increasingly upset about not being able to access information on the PMs?
It is not anyone’s place here to tie interpersonal interactions to the rules of the board. A penalty was invoked based on a violation. This had nothing to do with that. This was an incident involving personal pique on the part of someone who didn’t like the way he was addressed – and used his power to deny access to “get back” at the person who had “hurt” him that way.
Maoman is not MuzhaMan’s father, nor any other figure charged with improving MuzhaMan’s general morality or state of panache. It is inappropriate, IMHO, to tie any access to information on these boards to one’s interpersonal relationship with a single person here in real life.
But the guy has been a member for 10 years with more than 10,000 posts. He’s kinda like an encyclopedic tour guide extraordinaire with regards to hiking and biking, and hotels and hot springs and tea drinking and what have you. My Lonely Planet mentions Forumosa.com, which is why I’m here on the flob. I have no idea about the circumstances causing his suspension and I don’t really care about that. But banning him? Banning?
Bad blood. Not good. :aiyo:
I won’t take sides as this is a he said - he said argument, and the truth of the matter is probably somewhere in the middle.
Whether someone was rude or the other was vindictive, we won’t ever know fully.
That said, from a strictly technical viewpoint, the admin is not responsible for backing up info that a person had and needed to get access to on the site.
That said I hope the two of them can work it out.
If this was MY forum, and someone who had been banned called me up and said “hey, I understand the banning, can you just let me in to gget some importan tinfo from my PM box,” I would be inclined to co-operate. Especially if there was no reason to believe he was going to run around smearing shit on the walls. Muzha Man is a long-time poster, and can presumably be trusted to get his data without causing a fuss, so no problem.
But if someone, anyone, calls me up being angry about THEIR problem as if it’s my fault… why should I listen? If I was going through a difficult and time-consuming transition, and the person calling knew that, wouldn’t it be smart of them to consider my feelings before shouting about how hard their lives are?
Sure Maoman occasionally gets his head up his arse. Anyone who has been here for a while knows that. He’s not being paid by us to provide a service, so we have no rights to demand anything. We have to manage him just as we manage every other arsehole that wants to drive over us, change our contracts, or cut in front of us at 7-11 because he’s not thinking about us. Generally speaking, angry accusations are not helpful. You have to be the person dictating the tone and the outcome of the encounter if you don’t want to be the victim.
On the other hand, Muzha Man has a habit of losing his temper. he said that himself. Is it remotely possible that he called someone up and lost his temper? It sounds that way to me, and if I was on the receiving end of an angry phone call from someone that has been treated just like everyone else, well I wouldn’t be interested in listening.
It takes two to tango, and if you can’t dance without standing on your partner’s toes then you have to expect that you will end up on your arse occasionally. I think Muzha Man needs to grow up about this.
SeBANtics?
Again, Mucha Man was not backing up or storing info on the site. Someone had PM’d him some information, and Mucha Man went to retrieve it, but couldn’t get in.
Again, Muzha Man was not backing up or storing info on the site. Someone had PM’d him some information, and Muzha Man went to retrieve it, but couldn’t get in.[/quote]
That’s exactly how I understand it. I’m perplexed as to how some people are unable to see that - unless they’re just pretending not to see it simply for the sake of being snipey and vexatious.
I must say, I’m rather surprised to learn that being suspended disables one’s access to PMs. I’ve always viewed the PMs as just another place for emailing those of my friends and acquaintances who also happen to be posters on Forumosa, essentially no different from Yahoo Mail, Hotmail or any of the others. I hardly ever know whether or not anyone’s been suspended. If I need to contact a friend who happens to be a Forumosan, I’m as likely to pop onto Forumosa and drop him or her a PM as I am to send a mail from my Yahoo, Outlook or any other account. It could well be something quite important, like a lead for work, invitation to meet, request for a favour, or suchlike. And now I discover that the addressee might not even be able to receive such mails due to circumstances completely unknown and unsuspected by me. That diminishes the value of the PM function enormously.
I fully agree with everything Ironlady has written in this thread. I think it is entirely inappropriate that Mucha Man has been treated like that and prevented from using one of his regular channels of correspondence. Are we to accept that an administrator of, say, Google or Yahoo would be entitled to peremptorily cut us off from using our email account with them because they do not like something we wrote, or for any other reason? I hardly think so!
As for this suspension business, I’ve never felt comfortable about it. It’s too much like slapping little boys on the back of the thigh for being naughty, and hardly seems an appropriate way of treating an adult. If someone comes onto the site to troll and generally make himself unpleasant, then it’s probably better to bar his access. But if a regular member posts something out of line from time to time, there are surely better ways to respond than slapping him on the back of the leg or sending him to stand in the corner. I have never been suspended myself, and can hardly imagine myself posting anything that could conceivably warrant it in anyone’s eyes, but I have been dismayed many times to learn of others being suspended, and can hardly think of any instances where I felt that it was warranted.
My general impression of Maoman is that he’s a good bloke, and I’ll be very glad to meet him one day, shake his hand, buy him a drink, and thank him for all the good work he’s put into running Forumosa. But Mucha Man’s input to this site has, in my eyes, been every bit as substantial as Maoman’s. The information he has provided here is a very large part of the value of Forumosa. Maoman and others who administer the site should respect this, and he should not have been treated so shabbily.
Let’s keep in mind that most posters are never suspended and even fewer are ever banned. When people overstep the bounds of the Forumosa rules, they’re usually just sent to Temp. Banning and suspensions are for particular bigotry, personal attacks, or spectacular stroppiness (all of which would mess with the smooth running of discussion forums).
People need to have been pretty out of line in a post to have been banned outright. Moreover: maoman (now really just mortal), Goose Egg, and almost all the present mods are human, meaning mistakes are made, but also meaning that complaints will be listened to. I cannot fathom how someone like MM who really needed to get to his PMs could have lost the ability to realize that - after having done something bannable - he shouldn’t at least try to be contrite to get what he needed.
Admin doesn’t go too far:
A. Long time posters (more than others) know what could get them banned, and newer posters can check the rules. So why get yourself banned? How can you complain about not getting to your PMs afterwards? The rules are clearly laid out.
B. If you did something to get banned, just be nice to admin about it. Apologize and admin (even though they shouldn’t) will probably allow you access to what you need.
[quote=“tommy525”]When iv been suspended over the years by the big bad Mao what iv missed was not being able to read the Temp forum and any pm that may have been sent to me.
I think if it is possible, how bout when someone is suspended just suspend his ability to type anything in the forum but let him/her access his/her PM and also read all blogs?
Id go for that. Not being able to speak up (type up) would be punishment enough for many (me for sure).
oh and also add a SUSPENDED thingy to your avatar so others know u are in the doghouse?[/quote]
tommy, I love you - but the point of suspending people is to tell them that they are members of the community and are welcome to come back, but they - if they really like the flob - are supposed to feel uncomfortable and are not supposed to be able to do all that they want to do. Suspension is not supposed to be comfortable. It’s not about sadistic mods, but about having people realize the need to respect the Forum and other posters.
Whatever the actions of the mods or admin over the years, I cannot imagine that people have often been banned or suspended unless they were really asking for it.
yeahh … you are supposed to be PUNISHED and all that. . so its supposed to be at least INCONVENIENT 
No fun allowed in prison folks !
I think that’s a very important point to keep in mind (it’s hard to lose sight of this fact because those who get supended or banned tend to be the “noisiest” among us 
).
Back to another point: several people have suggested that rather than supending someone from using all of the BBS, shutting them out from certain forums for a while might be a better approach - i agree with that more graded approach. And i also think that the BBS might gain from having a “newbie” area: a group of forums that every new person signing up to the BBS will be limited to until they have been around for a while and are no longer newbies. In those special forums the rules would also be much stricter, to provide a gentler (“trial”) version of the of the BBS (for people to get acculturated) - that would mean, for example, that anybody (old fart or newbie alike) going into those newbie forums to even just so much as burp too loudly would be locked out of them right away. In the regular forums the rules could then be much more relaxed to give some room for gloves off interaction (bad behaviour is, after all, entertaining to some extent ). That way newly registered users would not likely to be shell-shocked and slink away after their first and only contribution, as has happened often enough - and those who have already grown a thick skin can still enjoy their usual bouts…
I posted a link here that someone mistook for porn and reported me to GE, thinking they were bringing bad things to light. I have been threatened with a permanent banning, 
but I am sure GE will actually watch the clip now and see the error of his Appian Way. 
First of all, I would not post porn here. What I posted was the classic scene from the brilliant movie Caligula with Peter O’Toole ( I know that sounds like a porn actor’s name, but I assure you, he’s legit) and Malcolm McDowell. It is exactly the scene Sandman is referring to in this thread. Yes, it was a film produced by Penthouse magazine and Bob Guccione, but legions of titties notwithstanding, it wasn’t a porn movie.
Now please…continue discussing,…what was it, oh ya…how admin goes too far. 
Well, fortunately in the end he was able to reach the person in question by other means, and got the needed info in the nick of time. But you see, people are not always online checking their email, nor do they always have their cell phones on. If the person in question had not responded in time, it would have been a big problem for Mucha Man.