I can identify some few of the people who were banned on the basis of being "trolls" as VS debaters.Gandalf wrote:Not all user banned are VS debators, in fact the majority of banned users are either trolls (check Parting Shots) or general miscreants.
Given the relatively small number of serious VS debaters on the whole, banning even one per month is worth remarking on. That's a ban a month not justified on the basis of most forums' rules, which "only" deal with spamming, trolling, copyright violations or other legal considerations, privacy violations, malicious code attacks or attempts to hack or flood the board, posting pornographic materials in an area accessible to minors, or - since flaming itself is not disallowed on SDN - flaming.
That's a time averaged figure, in fact often several months go by without a ban. And ban polls in the Senate do not always return a positive ban result. Sometimes there's a titling.
Hey if you can't abide by the rules than you shouldn't be posting there. Most people seem to be able to get along just fine.
Most boards have banned populations more on the order of 0.1-1% of their long-term membership.It's no secret that SDN has requirements for it's users to meet. But by and large the majority can meet them with little trouble.
Almost 14% of the total human population of a board on the banned list (and if anybody with access to the admin control panel on SDN would like to clarify that figure with greater precision, such figures are welcome - that's an extrapolation from the available lists of banned people) is a remarkably high figure. Even 5% would be unusually high, and for a board with SDN's membership base, permabanning one user a month would be more typical.
Indeed, the very fact that SDN has ban polls on a regular basis is quite unusual, as is the institution of custom titles used to try and shame users.
Actually, interest in the debate is still quite lively among people who have posted at SDN; just look at the activity of SDN members off the board, or of the activity of many of those who have been banned [or quit ahead of a ban] at SDN.There are several posters Alyeska for one who is pro Trek who posts and was a Supermod before resigning for personal reasons. THere is in fact numerous pro-Trek posters that post frequently. It's just that the VS subjects have been rehashed so many times on the board that everyone has lost interest.
Alyeska as a pro-Trek debater could only fly at SDN among the SDN core. Nowhere else does he seem to qualify.
For that matter, I heard the claim "rehashed so many times that everyone has lost interest" before ROTS even came out, and before anyone anywhere ever presented some of the analysis I've conducted and seen since launching my website here. There's lots of material pertinent to the VS debate that has never been hashed over at SDN.
And that leaves seven for which you haven't supplied a reason. Half of those aren't for a good reason either, and most of the unmoderated threads on the front page aren't debate threads at all.The moved threads have been moved because they don't pertain to the VS debate. The locked threads include one topic complaining about the pointlessness of the VS debate, no need for that, five necro'd threads for which there is a rule against, one thread pointing to this board for which there is a rule against, two spam topics for which there is a rule against and a topic that has been done a thousand times before.
In the past, I've noticed that many moved threads have pertained to the VS debate. The really interesting ones made by dissenters before they are banned or quit are fairly often moved to the HOS where non-members can't read them.
However, while we're talking about how heavily moderated SDN is, there are no rules against linking to other boards on SFJ, no deadline beyond which a thread is considered necessarily closed, and simply because a topic has been talked about before is no reason to arbitrarily close and lock the thread to prevent further discussion.
