Jedi Master Spock wrote:I realize Mr. Oragahn might rather I didn't post about this, but I happen to have been reading on SB.com the last couple days and looking through the ST v SW thread there. If Thanatos did not want to look biased as a moderator, dropping a ban on Mr. Oragahn for calling someone a "wanker" does not help. Especially when others used the same insult:
Leo1 wrote:You are a liar and a wanker both, changing your argument as convenient and making completely unfounded assumptions about the number of droid factories which are objectively wrong.
Lord Vespasian wrote: For someone who wanks as hard to Trek as you do, one would think you wouldn't have to consistently lie your way through every debate.
If I'm not greatly mistaken, there wasn't even as much as a token warning for those two, was there?
And insults of that sort were in almost every post. Not just "wanker" specifically - there were others, like "fuckwit," "idiot," "schmuck," "Trektard," etc, enough to determine that either the entire thread has been completely out of control for well over a month, or that the level of heat in Mr. Oragahn's statement was perfectly normal for SB.com. From observation, I would say the latter.
Not surprising though. Since the thread is made, I suppose ounces of explanations might be required now.
I may add that something really needs to be done about the banning system. It has become so terrible that it is literally quicker for me to learn more about my ban on
another website (here), that through the post of someone who is not even affiliated to the mod staff of SBC, than SBC's own board system, or its respective mods.
Let's not stop here. Here's what I was told:
You have been banned for the following reason:
It looks like we forgot to actually give you a final warning
Date the ban will be lifted: Dec 26th 2009, 9:00am
A
final warning? I guess someone was just too happy to have an excuse to kick me off once and for all?
I don't even remember getting a single one to boot. Essentially, I got banned because no mod gave me any warning.
I must applaud Thanatos' standards, once more.
Too hard to stomach? It must feel very empowering to have the ability to silence people who get on your nerves just because they happen to break the pseudo consensus on your pet franchise.
It becomes increasingly evident that a new batch of moderators is required, if only to alleviate the work of the "present" staff.
Thanatos exemplifies the problem of a moderation gone wrong. It also evidences the best aspects of a proper moderation, as we have here, or the theoretical advantages of almost zero moderation, as available at ClubASVS, while SBC is about a butt stuck between two chairs, and some people making it sure it stays that way.
The more excessive the lack of fairness, the more encouraged I am to expose it bluntly, and I don't think I'm the only one to follow that sort of pattern.
Now, since the real explanation will appear clearer by dealing with Thanatos' own interventions, let's take a look at his posts, shall we?
Post #785.
Thanatos wrote:Amazing. You were up for a Perma back in October and we decided to give you one more chance. You just blew it.
Goodbye.
This is interesting.
First, apparently I had already been under a permaban before, in October. The fact that it only lasted a couple of days would mean they retracted and narrowed it to a temporary ban.
I didn't even know they had already tried to get me out of SBC once and for all, and that based on totally
dishonest and unfair criteria.
Secondly, I don't recall being explicitly given
another chance. I actually barely got any notification at all. I had to insist to get some information, notably from Commander_Razor, whom I exchanged a few PMs with.
Thirdly, once again, I supposedly got permabanned, and again, the sanction was reduced to a temporary ban of ten days. Oh buggers. I really wish them luck next time, in following the protocol down to the letter so they won't have to put some facade of fairness, so they'll be able to get rid of my membership definitely.
Fourth: "We"?
More like
"I", and it was nothing short of a total abuse of moderating powers to provide help to the SW party in trouble, no more, no less. The fact that it's all too glaring and easy to prove makes all this truly pathetic. Like the last breaths of a squealing rat in death throes.
But if it
is truly "we", then perhaps I was being naïve in thinking that SBC was getting
better.
I didn't even get one single PM warning me that I was walking on thin ice.
Or perhaps it has to do with this
Yahoo thread* I had posted the 15th of December, but soon disappeared from the "non-scifi whining" board some few hours later... for which I received no notification either.
We're civilized people. If they'd rather have me not start such threads anymore (which of course would be a total WTF?? but never mind), then they could just have sent me a PM and that would have been all.
Maybe that would explain why, despite my reports on higbvuyb's trolling behaviour in two Halo threads, no mod really did anything about it. Since that last long disagreement between me+Mith and higbvuyb over
the interpretation of a piece of text from The Fall of Reach -- a thread wherein he was more concerned about attacking me than using his supposedly superior expression skills and logic to assemble some remotely believable and standing argument -- and
a damning poll, which pretty much proved that I and most concerned people at SBC actually shared the same interpretation over said text (just as Eric Nylund, the author of the very book, revealed, after being queried by Rama through an email!), Hig seems to have developed some kind of silly obsession about me that drives him to pounce on me about such things as syntax/comprehension/vocabulary, as seen
here, in the cheapest possible way, just for the sake of looking for trouble. I suppose he's never heard of such terms as "heat of fusion" for example. That must be too unscientific.
Then, again, despite my report of this, it didn't seem to trigger any moderator intervention whatsoever.
That's pretty much why I usually don't bother with the report function anyway.
Moving on, we get to his reply to Mith, in
post #793.
Thanatos wrote:Mith wrote:A permaban for what amounts to a light flame in the middle of a heated debate that's gone on for pages?
It was a highlight of his behavior and it was relevant to a specific problem we've been having with him.
Again, that "we" thing.
I'd really like to be enlightened about this "we" thing. I'm most curious about the "behind the scene" consensus about me, especially since my series of PMs to Razor.
Thanatos wrote:Mith wrote:? If I recall, Oraghan was doubting it because Leo1 mentioned it without the information.
He was directly replying to the links of my posts.
Mith wrote:that's like me saying "well, Darkstar said so...", not backing it up and then having me and him being called a Trektard.
If the same situation occurred with you in Leo1s place and another person in mine, I would take the same stance: You don't flame random third parties. You can have issue with an analysis but you don't go full on Ad Hominem.
The problem is that nobody ever contacts me. All it takes is a PM and I will try my best to look into any issue someone is having. I unfortunately cannot look at every post made in every thread right now. I've been extremely busy with both parents undergoing major heart surgery and working mega overtime to replace $4k dollars that a relative stole from me. People who send me a message are going to have the best chance of getting their issue resolved. I mean, I could have directly resolved any questions in regards to my distance calcs if I had known people had questions!
I'm going to try having reports go directly to me again, but all it takes is someone like Point 45 to ruin it again. Combined with me actually starting to get time to check the site in detail, I should be able to resolve any issues people have.
Oh and a general warning: Since I have a stepping off point with this thread, it will remain relatively civil from this post on or else I will close it and hand out punitive bans as required.
Yet, I said "wanker", in a thread flooded by an ocean of expletives and shrapnel of flowery language, and I'm permanently banned?
At this point, I'd say that's just someone looking for any excuse, even the most stupid one, as long as it seems to be relevant to the rules. This has more to do with fascism than anything else.
Still, I don't care about the anathema, it's not my goal to stand by the party line if only to avoid the petulant bursts of a mod who can't find any other alternative to his lack of bravery than abusing a button at folly, for as long as he still has the ability to do so, anytime he returns to the sole board that makes him feels the futile luxury of an enhanced pipe.
Once again, we'll muse about the tendency to let people such as Point45 or Kyosanim pollute threads, ignore glaring flame baiting, and suddenly decide that they have to enforce the rules they seem not to care about much most of the time.
Thanatos, in particular, likes to pretend he would apply the same rules to anyone, without any bias. But every time he intervenes in threads which are related to Star Wars in some fashion, he always targets the same group of people.
I suppose he mentioned Point45 just to appear partial, but this is certainly a virtue he doesn't possess.
As for his magic rule he pulled out of nowhere -- "You don't flame random third parties" -- it wouldn't be hard to believe if he had recently registered at SBC.
The point is that I have no patience for Thanatos anymore, and yes, I think he's a wanker. His words outside of SBC have been all I need for this, his presence at SDN rather indicative as well, and the standards of who gets a ban in a SW thread the final nail in the coffin.
Also, I certainly got tired of chasing Leo1 (SDN's Vympel) through the several hundreds posts long thread (!) to have him spill the beans he so badly needed, in order to back up the claimed ranges of SW infantry weapons he picked from several battles he cited as proofs. A behaviour which has been against
Rule 7**, which has been source of sanctions against other members in the past, but for some reason, despite me and l33telboi requesting the evidence, he seemed not bound to those same rules. Of course, he was also allowed to flame at will.
Thus far, despite being established as a fact that Leo1 had no evidence of any kind, and certainly didn't have the slightest understanding of the only source of information he deemed necessary to support his claims (Thanatos' posts which I harshly attacked), he got away with that, and is yet to comply.
I'm rather sick of seeing Leo1 keeping asking for evidence up to the 8xx post. The hypocrisy flies really high over there.
Post #795.
Thanatos wrote:
Minor correction: We seem to have (embarrassingly) forgotten to actually deliver his final warning.
Ban reduced to ten days.
Yes, let's pretend that "we" want to do it by the book and be totally fair. :|
That's just horse crap.
- * You may want to look at this PDF document to know what it's all about. Page 12 is of interest.
- **
7) Burden of Proof.
An extension of rule #6.
If you make the claim, you must provide the evidence. This includes (but is not limited to) extracts from sources, screenshots, short clips or others as appropriate. In addition to this, the FULL evidence must be presented. Failure to provide the evidence to back up a claim in a reasonable timeframe will result in a the claim being declared as false.
Continual failure to back up claims will be ground for penalties as decided by the moderator staff.