Passive-Aggressive Modding

[Ree]

Offering sympathies is sometimes not a easy thing to do when someone doesn't know if they are going to be accepted or not.

Right.
That's my point. I was letting him know he had no reason to fear.
Again, you have your style and I have mine.
People grieve in different ways and handle situations differently.
What works for one may not work for another.

But it was passed about, you said that you shared the messages with other mod's. Which means that others were aware of what had happened. And the change was only made after those four messages were passed.

Again...are you serious???
The mods had been offering their own messages of condolence and offering their shoulders to me during a difficult time. I had been sharing some of the emotions I was dealing with on that weekend.

You are seriously saying I was wrong to share an email from a banned member that had left me blind sided? I should have just deleted and sucked it up and pretended it didn't happen?

Interesting point, but I guess I was allowing feelings to get in the way.

Again, the only reason it was shared publicly was because a member started this thread implying that a mod just suddenly decided to commit an act of "fuckwittery" and "dick around" with a profile because they were bored one day and couldn't let a grudge go.
I was setting the record straight.

[Aethian]

RAgain...are you serious???
The mods had been offering their own messages of condolence and offering their shoulders to me during a difficult time. I had been sharing some of the emotions I was dealing with on that weekend.

You are seriously saying I was wrong to share an email from a banned member that had left me blind sided? I should have just deleted and sucked it up and pretended it didn't happen?

Interesting point, but I guess I was allowing feelings to get in the way.

Right, it was a difficult time. With high flows of emotions and nerves rubbed raw from those emotions. I think it should, maybe not been deleted, but left till a later time when nerves weren't so raw and emotions weren't so high.

He came to you and offered sympathies, what would have been so wrong with just saying thank you and maybe later asking why he thought you didn't like him? That way heads could be level and it probably wouldn't have gone the way it did.

With my past situation of my Mother I had gone back and talked to one of the coworkers who thought that we didn't see eye to eye. And found out it was just because our personalities clashed in such a way that while we can sometimes work together nicely we're mostly butting heads.

[AdminAssistant]

I don't think anyone in a state of mourning should be expected to make rational decisions.

However, when it comes to the issue of the edits, what I see is the desire to further punish someone who has already received the ultimate punishment. If someone has been banned, there's nothing more that can be done...except public humiliation that he cannot defend himself against. It was bad form.

[Evandril]

First off - Ree, you did nothing wrong in my opinion, and you've done your best to try and keep people from bashing someone who, again in my opinion, deserves it.

As far as checking the profiles of banned members...I've been known to, honestly, because I'm curious enough cats tend to look at me and go 'Really? Give it a rest!' If I am reading a thread, and notice someone's been banned, I tend to bounce to their profile, and check their last few posts, see if I can figure out what happened (Rare, as the mods here are good about removing anything that's 'bad' enough to get someone banned...but see 'curious' part above ) I've yet to find/notice an edit like the OP mentioned, and do know I'd lose a bit of respect for any mods who made such a choice. Yeah, it's a human thing to do, and 'tis natural to want to repay someone who's hurt a friend, doubly so when it wasn't justified...but if you're in authority, you've got a higher set of standards than otherwise. I'm an NCO, and it can be annoying at times that I have *less* freedom to act than I did as an Airman, because of those 'standards'...even though 'legally' I can do more at present.

[MadMike]

I mean, that's passive-aggressive; picking on a dude that isn't even able to defend himself, simply because somebody in charge has got a gripe and wishes to keep on pushing it no matter how dead the issue is. I'm rather glad that none of the mods HERE would even think of performing such an anti-social action of major douchery.

Isn't that last sentence itself "passive-aggressive?"

But it was passed about, you said that you shared the messages with other mod's. Which means that others were aware of what had happened.

That's something we normally do. Sometimes it's to give the rest of the group a heads-up about possible trouble, or to discuss what to do with a member that isn't playing by the rules -- i.e. should we moderate them, ban them, infract them, or just have a friendly word with them. Not sure what the problem is here.

What a lot of people don't seem to realize is that we almost always discuss it with the group before taking an action on a member, except for spammers and obvious trolls, which we just ban immediately. About the only time I banned an actual member without discussing it with the team first was a guy who made a post or two that seemed fine, but then made a third one that was highly inappropriate. One of the other mods warned him about it, and was told to "take the stick out of your ass" via a public post in that same thread. Since he was still on newbie moderation, no one saw it but us, but I infracted him for it. So then he called me a "nazi." Not sure how he knew I was of german heritage, but I figured he wouldn't want to be in the same board as a nazi, so I did him a favor and banned his ass. Interestingly enough, he tried to come back in a few weeks later.

[blas87]

I missed all of this I guess, but I do have a question.

How is it that banned people are still allowed to PM people?

Besides just Hobbs, I made a thread in CS on New Years 2009 and a banned member (who had been on ban for quite some time) sent me a PM with their opinion of my thread, since they couldn't post.

[Ree]

Banned people can't PM.

I was contacted off the board via email, and via Facebook.
I have blocked him now, as I have his apology and I just want it all to end.

As for the banned member who contacted you, that may have been a temporary loophole in the settings. I believe it's fixed now.

[blas87]

Thanks for the clarification. It was over a year ago, so that would make sense if that person couldn't contact me again.

At any rate, Ree, I am glad you blocked him and I sincerely hope you don't let him get to you. I know that sounds way easier said than done, but I hope you realize how much you are cared about and loved on both of these sites. You are a dear and a treasure to us.

As far as the editing.....we all have our moments. I can say I've done some things I've later not been proud of, but sometimes when someone picks on your friend or someone you care about, you can't help but stoop to that level.

[Rapscallion]

We're human. We make mistakes. I make them, which is one of the reasons I don't really come down on people hard for it. Repeated errors from which people don't learn is another matter.

I'm not at home right now - been on a racing weekend, and I'm pretty close to shitfaced from lack of sleep. I might have more to add as and when.

Rapscallion

[Lace Neil Singer]

I will say this; on the board that I admin on, if a member is perma banned, I will go into their profile and edit it.

Before everyone jumps at me screaming about abuse of power, I will say that all I do is a) delete comments so as to ease the load on the servers (no point leaving comments up when they are not returning) and b) make the profile private so that random people can't jump on there and post stuff.

Honestly, before I started doing this to banned member's profiles, there were people, sometimes victims of the member's attacks, harrassment or trolling, sometimes just randoms, who'd post with gloating messages in the "serves you right! lol" vein. Making the profile private view seems to work as far as that's concerned.

However, I'd never edit their profile to make them look bad. Sure, I may delete anything rude, obscene or downright nasty directed towards the forum staff, but the rest of it can stay as it is. I don't really care enough to want to bother with such people a minute more than I have to.

[HYHYBT]

I remember something like this happening when the old owner was in charge. It was a long time ago, though, shortly after I first found CS (early 2000s). Some girl on the forum got into it with a few other members and the site owner and got banned. After she got banned, the owner edited all of her posts to say something like "I am a little whine bag who acts like a baby whenever people don't like what I have to say." That is almost definitely not the exact wording, but it was something to that effect. It did contain the term "whine bag," though. That much I remember. The owner actually took some heat from some of the other members over that.

The only thing I remember like that was someone who left in a Royal Huff and, unusually, demanded that *all* her posts be removed. If I understood rightly, threatening legal action if they weren't (not that she'd likely get far...) So they were all replaced with that message.

[BlaqueKatt]

now I don't personally know Ree, but I've interacted with her enough on CS for many years, and here on fratching, so I may be way off on my assessment here, but it seems to me, that she may have felt NOT responding to the PA "I know you don't like me" statement would cause the other person to think "Ha I knew it, now I have proof that it was a personal vendetta"

Good people would rather others not think ill of them, and will go to great lengths to avoid/address misunderstandings of this nature.

[Ree]

it seems to me, that she may have felt NOT responding to the PA "I know you don't like me" statement would cause the other person to think "Ha I knew it, now I have proof that it was a personal vendetta"

Exactly!!!
Thank you.

[Aethian]

Good people would rather others not think ill of them, and will go to great lengths to avoid/address misunderstandings of this nature.

Probably why Hobbs got reamed out by the girlfriend. that statement can be taken so many different ways. And no some good people out there won't try to avoid misunderstandings because unless told that there could be a misunderstanding they will believe there is no misunderstanding.

[Rapscallion]

As I said before, we're human. I can't currently recall anyone on the moderating team having done anything like this before during my ownership.

You might like to think about that. Most of the time we get flak because people don't know the full story and we're accused of being heavy handed or unfair. Fine, that goes with the turf. With the number of times said individual has tried to sneak back in and continued being harassing via other methods. From my perspective, he would only behave decently when under imminent threat of punishment (ie on moderaton), and as soon as he was off that it was back to skirting the line and jumping over it every few posts.

Just try and imagine how frustrating that is, even when shared amongst a team. I knew about the edit when it happened. I didn't do anything about it. As a team, we were incredibly frustrated. To a certain extent we still are.

We're human. Professionalism isn't always possible.

I agree with you on this point. I meant in a more general sense if the mods don't want to be insulted to picked on in a public manner then they shouldn't do the same to someone else in a public manner such as profile edits is all.

We were getting that anyway. Bit of a lose-lose situation.

But for this to turn into a "Well we had good reason" argument doesn't look good to me. It looks more like a abuse of power. And I KNOW the mods around here are normally better then falling to abuse of power and it saddens me to find that someone did lose better judgment and do what they did.

The reason for any sort of administrative authority is to protect the community at large. Do you really think we were the only targets? Does anyone think he's not reverted to type wherever he is?

Rapscallion