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Hey Guys,
Yeah, keep it clean, keep the peace, and we'll all be good to go here. Might be easiest if we pretend the day never happened.
The good news is, all forums go through this kind of growing pain from time to time. If you don't believe me, take a look at this thread on our sibling site Treo Central (biggest Palm Treo forum on the net) - Moderating civil discussion in the forums (especially off-topic) - TreoCentral.com
The good news is the forums will go on, we'll all learn from the mistakes we may have made, and because we love this site so darn much we'll keep spreading the word and make sure it keeps growing. I know some harsh words we're thrown yesterday, which is totally uncalled for regardless of reasoning (this is just a website about BlackBerrys after all).
I made a mistake on my end and it's one that I'm going to rectify in the next few days. That mistake is not having the Infraction System set up in the forums yet. One of the problems we have now is that while the Rules and Guidelines are written out and pretty clear, we don't have a management system in place to clearly and consistently issue and track rule breaking, warnings, bans, etc.
With the Infraction system place, we basically assign values to difference offenses, and trigger points which yield temporary or permanent ban.
Illustration: Let's say the trigger points are: 10 points is a 3 day ban, 20 points is a one month suspension, and 25 points is a permanent ban. Values for offenses might be: 5 points for inappropriate language, 3 points for posting more than one url in your signature, 20 points for personally attacking a member in the forums, and spamming is 25 points (0 tolerance for spamming - immediately banned for life).
So in this case, let's say you say you swear or say something really inappropriate in the forums. An Infraction is issued by the moderators and you have 5 points against you. Then let's say you swear again a couple of days later and get another infraction. You're not at 10 points, and the 3 day ban is automatically issued. We can also set expiry times on infractions. So let's say you swear once and have 5 points against you... after 3 months that infraction will expire and you're back to 0 points (totally clean slate). The numbers above were just examples for now....will get it all figured out, but basically what this allows us to do is give everyone certainty in what they are allowed/not allowed to do and they know in advance the ramifications of they're actions. It also adds a layer of transparency to the moderation team - it doesn't matter which moderator is doing the moderating as the punishments/past offences/handing out of bans are all managed by the system.
So expect that system to be in place soon. I will make an announcement once it's up and everyone will be able to monitor their actions accordingly.
So let's keep it clean, keep it fun.12-08-07 10:07 AM
