Foes For Peace!! -- (how to QUASI-BAN someone, including pm)

[JasonPratt]

I thought I should drop a copy in this category for some reason.

Let us say that a particular forum member is cluttering up threads and the categories and the active topics list with comments you’d rather just not even see for whatever reason. Since I’m the most prolific poster here (in the long run anyway), we’ll say for example it’s me.

How do you institute what amounts to your own ban of me, so that for all practical purposes I don’t even exist on the forum anymore (so far as you are concerned)?

STEP 0.) You have to be a member yourself for this to work, and you have to be logged in already. Only members can quasi-ban other members. (So, um, memberize yourself and login. Then come back to this page. )

STEP 1.) Find a hyperlink of my name somewhere on one of the pages, and click on that to bring up my user profile. (These hyperlinks can be found bunches of places: for example under a thread I started, or near the top of any of my comments, or even if I happen to be the latest poster in a thread. Another place to find that hyperlink is by clicking the “members” hyperlink near the top-right of any page, just under the site banner and between “FAQ” and “logout”.)

STEP 2.) You should now see a page looking something like this.

Unless you’re a mod or admin you won’t see a little button saying “banning” near the top of the page. Sorry. But don’t worry, the next step should work just as well.

STEP 3.) Declare this person to be your… FOE!!!

And then click the “Add Foe” button.

It’s found at the bottom of the first block, in the middle. (You’ll have to scroll down a little in my graphic above, up there, to see it. Or I could just be marginally less lazy and provide another graphic I guess…)

STEP 4.) I’m not sure what happens next, because I was a little worried that if I declared myself my foe, the internet would implode like that house at the end of Poltergeist. But I expect a screen will come up saying something like, “Foe this person, yes or no?” With little buttons reading “yes” and “no”, or maybe “foe” and “yay” or something underneath. Click one of those buttons if so. If not, skip this step.

STEP 4.1) Follow these instructions from this comment in the official thread for this topic to do the same for quasi-banning someone from privately emailing you.

STEP 5.) Bask in the blessed quiet, and in the knowledge that you need never have to bother with me, or whoever you’re foeing, again. Until the Day of the Lord to come anyway–who knows what will happen then? (See board discussions. )

STEP 6.) Profit.

STEP 7.) Thank God for peace. (Alternately: move this step anywhere higher in the procedure, and/or repeat, as desired.)

STEP 8.) Pray for the admins and mods. (We can’t foe someone. So unless we ban them for everyone, we have to put up with keeping an eye on what they’re doing.)

[RanRan]

‘Foe’ sounds too harsh - and I like a good foe. ‘Pos & Neg’ with all nuance trailing along with it - might be better.

Question: if I ever stop being a butt-head (at times! - cut me some slack) how will they know if they can’t see me.

Honestly, I’m not keen on the idea as it cuts down on the action and could end up creating elitist cliques.

My greatest fear is that a malicious person (secretly holding a view that we are heretics) feels it is his/her duty to bring this site down. I think a foe like that should be banned. A person like that will not stop and perhaps bring others of like mind in to assist. By their posts, ye shall know them.

[Aaron]

STEP 4.) I’m not sure what happens next, because I was a little worried that if I declared myself my foe, the internet would implode like that house at the end of Poltergeist.

[JasonPratt]

‘Foe’ sounds too harsh - and I like a good foe. ‘Pos & Neg’ with all nuance trailing along with it - might be better.

True, but the button was labelled “foe”–which is pretty important to get right, because for a long time I was trying to find out where the “ignore” button was, and failing.

(Then I discovered that I, as a moderator–my administrator rank doesn’t translate to admin powers due to technical difficulties–couldn’t ignore anyone anyway. I’m pretty sure there are several theological morals or parables or something about this whole affair… )

Also, “foe” was much funnier. I even worked in an obscure trope joke based on a Japanese anime term. (As with several such things in anime, it’s probably better for readers not to delve more deeply into the meaning of that joke. )

Question: if I ever stop being a butt-head (at times! - cut me some slack) how will they know if they can’t see me.

Good question. One would suppose (let’s bring it back to me for the example) that if I was just being immediately foed by everyone who ever joined the forum, then I’m probably still being a butt-head of epic levels. But if that isn’t the case, and I make a comment that some new person actually can see; that person could quote me in response where other people could see. (Not in a thread I started of course; I mean whoever foed me wouldn’t be able to see that.) It would become obvious relatively quickly, I think, whether I was still acting like a butt-head.

Interestingly, since mods and admins can’t foe someone–we can only ban them–then one way back to reconciliation would be for mods or admins to demonstrate by appreciative quoting that I was acting sensibly again (even in my opposition).

On the other hand, if I’m still cluttering up the boards with material, this is something that any unregistered visitor can see, so I still have some potential audience. Until the mods/admins decide they’re tired of me degrading the content of the board for visitors and outright ban me (deleting off my threads etc.)

Honestly, I’m not keen on the idea as it cuts down on the action and could end up creating elitist cliques.

I’m not keen on a lot of ideas; but: a.) this is something built into the engine which any member has a right to use as he or she sees fit; and b.) I’m even less keen on despotic banning from on high (though I’m willing to do that, if it comes to it). Also c.) I’m tired of spending my limited forum time on demoralizing mod issues. I’d rather be engaging in actual discussion, writing papers, reading research done by other members, learning new facts or angles I hadn’t thought of before (pro or con). And I’m tired of civilians being demoralized because we admins won’t start pulling the trigger on ‘people who are bothersome’.

So, there you go. I can’t stop people from ignoring person X informally; and I’m not sure I’d have any right to stop them if I could; and they have forum abilities to ignore person X formally, too.

My greatest fear is that a malicious person (secretly holding a view that we are heretics) feels it is his/her duty to bring this site down. I think a foe like that should be banned. A person like that will not stop and perhaps bring others of like mind in to assist. By their posts, ye shall know them.

And until they’re banned, now you can let the computer ignore them, if you (I mean ‘you’ generally, not you specifically Ran) don’t feel up to the rigor and intellectual discipline of ignoring them ‘manually’.

Note: speaking of pulling the trigger, I’m deleting any comments in this thread I deem unsuitable for the purpose of this thread. Yay despotism. sigh.

[TGB]

If I’m folowing it, we have a feature like this on another board I frequent where its called “blocking” another member. It’s not a bad idea. You push the button and all that member’s posts no long appear within any thread you read (though they do appear to other members). Blocking another member only affects the page appearance as you see it. You can’t decide how the page/thread appears to other members. Everything else stays exactly the same. We’ve used if very little actually. And it never got abused. There’s really no way to abuse it. Your blocking another member only affects YOU. And if you want, you can click the button again and unblock that member and, poof, their posts all reappear. And blocked members can still send you personal notes (in case they want to grovel and apologize). It’s not as perfect a solution as banning someone from the board, because what happens is that since most of us quote the text of the post we’re responding to, the comments of a blocked member still end up staring you in the face via other posts. Most of our posts can be reproduced from the posts of others who do respond to us. So there’s no avoiding the blocked person.

I just wanna say that I don’t treat discussion boards like online churches. If we attended the same church, I’d have to deal with Aaron37 (since we’d be breaking bread together, etc.). I’d have to say all the things I’ve said here about him to his face and ask him to try to work on things because I DO want the power of the Kingdom to transform how we relate and enable us to be a blessing to one another. And he could speak the truth in love to me too. In the community of faith there ought to be no running away from a brother or sister. I would never suggest Aaron37 be excommunicated from the church (to parallel banning him here) for example. But this isn’t that kind of context exactly, and you can only engage others profitably if they invest humbly in the conversation too. If they don’t, they you’re hamstrung–even within your church context.

Tom

[JasonPratt]

And if you want, you can click the button again and unblock that member and, poof, their posts all reappear.

Oh, yeah, I did kind of forget to mention that part…

Uh, same instructions but different. (I think you’d have to go to “members” to look for the name; or go to one’s own member-entry and look for foed people to un-foe. UnFO? Alternately, click on the User Control Panel and tab around for a while.)

And blocked members can still send you personal notes (in case they want to grovel and apologize).

Or pester. But there may be some way to block that as well. (More likely, we would just count that as an outright banning offense, but we’d have to look into it as to details.)

the comments of a blocked member still end up staring you in the face via other posts. Most of our posts can be reproduced from the posts of others who do respond to us. So there’s no avoiding the blocked person.

Unless they’re a person whom so many others have decided is worthless to talk with, that he’s foed by a lot of people. Quote content suddenly drops off sharply.

But otherwise, right. Still, substantially better than having to wade through everything all the time.

I just wanna say that I don’t treat discussion boards like online churches. If we attended the same church, I’d have to deal with Aaron37 (since we’d be breaking bread together, etc.).

That’s a good point.