New Members Brooks Hatlen, Tearfrogs and Devman

NUance said:
If you keep their PM capability at least we can monitor it. To the extent they use PMs, that is. /my just 2 cents worth
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I can see where you are coming from, although I don't think we even want to monitor them. Let 'em say what they like; if it's not through our board software, we don't need to worry about it.

I'm good with banning him. Anyone else?
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That's three! Yeah, I think these known circumventers can be given a short leash to show they might be here for some reason other than to cause trouble. If they complain but are also making posts that are fine, they can stay.

Devman's clearly not that. I see he even said he's only here to be an a-hole for his own amusement. So with that in mind, I'm going to go ahead and ban the account.

(Separately, I think Tear and Brooks are OK for now. Not really breaking rules.)

 
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Actually, both Brooks and Tear are breaking a rule - they created an account to circumvent the ban.

I'm really having trouble justifying leaving any of those accounts. It's not like they weren't given a chance to behave before - they were, and they elected otherwise. And I'm having a LOT of trouble figuring out what benefit this is to us. The ONLY benefits I can (arguably) make is that, first, letting them stay gives them one less bullet to use to sway possible converts to their site, and second, banning them simply gives them the attention they want; that they are getting under our skin. However, in the former case, I'm pretty sure that anyone that was going to align with them has, and their site isn't likely to grow much more. To the latter, banning doesn't really show they are getting under our skin - it's what we do when a banned member returns after the level of crap they caused.

And I come back to this - if we leave them, isn't that some kind of tacit statement we never should have banned them? And rest assured, they had to be banned.

 
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Yeah, I agree with AR. It seems we'd had a pretty low tolerance for banned members trying to come back in the past so I'm not sure why that should change now. Particularly ones who - mostly - went down so publicly, kicking and screaming the entire way.

And if you look at their behavior on HLR and what they've done here, they are here for no other reason than to cause as much trouble as they can.

The only reason to keep them is to laugh at their childish behavior. But I don't think that's reason enough.

 
Yes -- but we are generally OK with this if they don't rise to the level of causing problems.

Brooks: He's made a Huskers related status post, a couple of posts in the main forums that are fine, and hasn't antagonized anybody. I really think this is OK.

Tear: He just hasn't come up on my radar. He did call Blitz a douche -- in the shed's Douchebag HOF thread. I have to admit, I think that's enough. I have to agree here, he should be banned, unless you do want to leave this be for a little while and see what he does, as you said this morning.

In these cases, I think we're justified to ban at any time. Some are just easier to ban right away, and those are the ones who are getting into fights, and not posting elsewhere. However, I can't really argue much in Brooks' favor if we mostly think he should go. It would be completely fair.

I would just somewhat prefer he did something everybody can see as assholish first, if that makes sense. And if he never does -- all the better. (I know that nobody is holding their breath over this).

 
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I'd really like to agree with that zoogs and in a different set of circumstances I'd go for it. I'd really like to know who Brooks is and give him another shot. He seems to be making an effort to behave, other than +1ing the rowdies.

But I just don't know if it will work out well in this case. We're dealing with several guys who had repeated chances and still don't think we were justified in being banned. Now they tried to sneak back in and - either overtly or covertly - have been mainly supporting ridiculing members - admittedly in the 'Shed where it's allowed. But if that's your main reason to be here, it's not going to end well, sooner or later.

If we only ban a couple of them, those remaining will simply whine louder that we're again being arbitrary.

Either way, I see this as another FLU situation where we'll spend the next several month playing cat-and-mouse trying to figure out who's trying to sneak back in.

I guess I could be talked into Brooks - at least give him a chance. Devman and Tearfrogs I think should go.

 
I banned the other two - Brooks and Tear. What convinced me was this - if we allow them to stick around when we know they are here, we're going to end up with those same cliques re-forming. It feeds Junior, sd'huskers (sic) and the others. There's nothing to be gained.

So, for future reference, use the HLR thread to post any of them that come back with socks. You can go into their profile and click the Flag as Spammer button, and that will stop their ability to post until an admin can perform an outright ban. Or, use the warning system and give them enough points to trigger a ban, which also means using the Spammer reason for the warning. Either will work. It'll be a pain because they'll just come back, but after a while it will die down. This is the same thing that happened years ago with Husker Power Hour. We played whack-a-mole for a while, but it finally ended.

Thanks, everyone.

 
What convinced me was this - if we allow them to stick around when we know they are here, we're going to end up with those same cliques re-forming.
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I can get on board with that.

I'm really glad for those days to be gone.

AR -- can the moderators not ban from the warning system? Is there a setting that only allows admins to?

 
Yeah, no probs on my part for banning any of these three. I probly wouldn't have pulled the trigger just yet. But as I think about it, they're not here to be productive members of HB, in the long run anyway. Good call.
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AR Husker Fan said:
I don't recall a setting like that, and it seems like a glaring omission. But let's poke around a bit and see.
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As I recalled, no. I think I see the reason for that. There are two kinds of ban. The one that mods can trigger removes a person's ability to post, but that's it. A full ban allows you to block the username, the email address, the IP address, etc. But that has to be done through the Control Panel, and IPB tends to be pretty restrictive in that regard. We can add people individually for that, and I think IPB did that as kind of a last resort. But that gets pretty messy, keeping track of that, and opens some security issues. So, it's the spammer route.

 
Ah, that makes sense.

I was actually asking if we all see the same interface in the warning menu. I assume we do. That's how I am banning people. I check "remove ability to post content" permanently, and then I tick "move to Banned group".

Then they can be banned again in the ACP to catch the IPs and e-mail (which I believe is a unique identifier, anyway)...but it seems to me that all this does is make it harder for them to create new accounts right away. It is still impossible to stop anyone from creating a new account very soon.

 
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The interface is the same. I was just thinking of speed and ease of use. Hitting the Spammer is a one click operation either in the member's profile page or in the Warning page. With the warning system, you can set various defaults for certain offenses. I set Spammer to default to a ban.

My thinking is going back to the time we had the dust-up with Husker Power Hour. They were creating accounts right and left. We'd ban them, but it was a bit slow. The HLR crew could do the same - in fact, Roto/Dev said that all the new accounts this month were HLR socks. And Eric noted that this time of year we only averge one new member per month.

Which reminds me - I'm going to grab a list of the new registrations for the last week or two and post them in the HLR thread. We can keep an eye out for them. Or, I can just check activity and some other factors and ban the accounts. But either way, I'll list them in the HLR thread.

EDIT: Scratch that. they've created too many. So, back to the original plan - look for new members that hit the Woodshed immediately, or that start handing out +1s to Junior and that crew, etc. Hit them with a ban/spammer and post the username in the HLR thread.

 
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