Quote:
Originally Posted by bingle
Wow. I don't follow MobileRead as closely as some others, but I'm really unhappy that both of these options exist in this forum and have been used. Perhaps I'm jumping to conclusions. I hope so.
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Hey, bingle, I can understand why you're alarmed.
First let me say that yeah negative karma and banning exist here, they're kind of built into the forum software. However, negative karma is only available to Editors and Admins, to limit its impact, and it's used extremely sparingly as a dissuasive measure.
Banning is almost exclusively reserved for Spammers, who oh so richly deserve it.
The case you're probably referring to is, as I understand it, the second time in the history of MobileRead in which a non-spammer has been banned. I wasn't around for the first one some years back, but I understand it was similar to this more recent incident.
In this case, if you'll have a look at the posts of the former user over the past couple of weeks, you'll see a consistent attitude on his part of abrasiveness, discourtesy, and disrespect. He mostly didn't cross into outright rudeness, but he skated that line about as closely as you can
without crossing it too much. You'll
also see a lot of effort to persuade him to comport himself in a manner consistent with the atmosphere that you refer to: one that's friendly, helpful and willing to entertain a very wide variety of ideas in a
civil manner.
It got to the point where we finally concluded that we simply had no recourse but to ban the user in the interest of
preserving that atmosphere. We agonized over it quite a bit, but reluctantly came to the conclusion that there just wasn't another option.