Don't Be a Dick

[stealthwise]

There's a lot of people here that post under their real names or have links to their Facebook/Twitter accounts. If you do that, you're saying "I want to have these same conversations with the people from here, but let's do it on sites X, Y, and Z". In which case, the policy of those sites should run those conversations and this site shouldn't enter into it. If it reaches cyberstalking levels, then maybe the mods should interfere, but dealing with it on the site that the problem is actually occurring on would seem like the better option.

It's a good option as well, but a strong message is sent when someone who violates this rule is no longer allowed to participate in or use this board for those types of activities. Turning a blind eye to something that happens on Facebook simply because it's happening over there and not here is a fairly obvious means of consenting to those types of activities.

I don't think that this is a huge concern to those not involved in this type of harassment anyways.

[Hugin]

Or it's a fairly obvious way of showing that the moderators know what is and isn't their responsibility. Maintaining order here, sure. But it's not their duty to deal with stuff that happens elsewhere. Facebook has fairly specific rules. This site has different(and far less specific) rules. Things that are allowed on one site are banned on the other, and vice versa. That's the benefit of the internet, people can find a place with rules that fit them. If someone doesn't like how Twitter handles harassment, they can either make their account private, leave Twitter, or, and this is always an option, never post the contact info to a public board. This board's rules shouldn't apply to Twitter, and Twitter's rules(thankfully) don't apply here.

Stealth, right now you don't think it applies to you. What happens when you get in an argument with someone on here, and then they claim that your Tumblr started sending them hateful messages. You don't even have a Tumblr, but they give Corrina their password, and yep, there's hate referencing that argument. Could be a different board member, could be a setup, but you can't prove your innocence and the mods here only have partial evidence. People are dicks, that's the entire reason this thread exists. I don't like rules that give people more ways to be dicks.

[CutterMike]

While I agree that this can be a bit of a grey area, I can see the mods' point.

If someone STARTS being a dick here, is warned and drops the issue here, but follows the target to other sites and continues the harassment, they're STILL being dicks -- I think we can all agree to that. The question is, "Should the mods here tolerate/encourage passive-aggressive 'but I'm not doing anything HE-E-E-E-E-E-RE, am I?' rules-lawyering, or should they have the ability to say 'You clearly can't stop acting like a dick and we don't want you here.'?"

Look -- some kid gets harassed in school, then on the way home from school, then when online in his/her bedroom, and the effect is cumulative. Unfortunately, everyone at the school, on the street, on the web says "But THAT part didn't happen HERE, so it wasn't our fault!" At some point, maybe somebody SHOULD say "You were a dick to person X here, you've shown that you can't STOP being a dick to person X, so we can either wait for you to be a dick to person X here AGAIN, or to person Y or to person Z, OR-R-R-R-R we can save everyone but YOU some aggravation and drop you now. Buh-BYE!"

Again, I see the problems with this approach, but I can also see the point, and if this were to happen the FIRST time that someone acted like a dick, I would agree that it was misplaced. OTOH, if someone shows repeatedly -- here AND elsewhere -- that he/she can't leave someone from here alone, then I see no problem with saying to him/her, "well, at least you won't do it here".

As with any policy, the answer to the question of whether it's GOOD policy lies in the way it's implemented. If used with restraint, I think that it can be useful in keeping things here calmer.

[Flamebird]

Or it's a fairly obvious way of showing that the moderators know what is and isn't their responsibility. Maintaining order here, sure. But it's not their duty to deal with stuff that happens elsewhere. Facebook has fairly specific rules. This site has different(and far less specific) rules. Things that are allowed on one site are banned on the other, and vice versa. That's the benefit of the internet, people can find a place with rules that fit them. If someone doesn't like how Twitter handles harassment, they can either make their account private, leave Twitter, or, and this is always an option, never post the contact info to a public board. This board's rules shouldn't apply to Twitter, and Twitter's rules(thankfully) don't apply here.

There's your answer, right there in bold.
Don't like it, go somewhere else and no one from here will follow/ harass you either.
If someone does, tell someone here and they would try to help.
Meanwhile the whole point is; we're a group of friends and don't like people "f-in" with our friends.
You do that, we really don't want you here anyway.
Not to say you have to like and be friends with everyone here; cause that's never gonna happen either.
Goes back to "don't be a dick".

[Flamebird]

Point of clarification:

Don't be a dick includes not being a dick to your fellow Gailbo/Benbo posters on other sites as well. Hence, if I had a bone to pick with Corrina, I would be a dick by carrying it over to her Facebook page or Twitter feed. And as such I would still be in violation of the overall "Don't Be a Dick" rule to this board.

Thank you for your time and attention.

Meanwhile, I hope you only picked Corrina as an example and not that someone was dumb enough to actually mess with her.
She's nearly as scary as Sally.

[dasNdanger]

Some good points.

I think the bottom line is this: A mod on the Jinxworld forums only has powers that apply here, to problems that happen here.

I was a mod at Marvel for a couple years, and when I came over here (while still a mod at Marvel), I couldn't dictate how things were handled here, or who should or should not be disciplined for bad conduct. However, I could privately - and tactfully - inform the mods here of a problem that exists between certain posters on another site (I never ran across any situation like that). Even so, I wouldn't be in a rush to do it since mods have their own ideas of how to control the user behavior.

So that raises the question - if I know a person is a problem on another forum, but behaves on the one I mod, can I ban them just for the hell of it? CutterMike makes some very good points, and I almost want to say that a person who is a problem elsewhere should be restricted here, even if they've never caused a problem.

However, as an illustration, can you ban a person from a restaurant just because they had a food fight at another establishment? No, not really. You can only take away privileges based on what they do in your establishment, not in others.

Sometimes environment dictates how a person will act on a given forum. A lax forum will have more problems than a strict one. If the person behaves HERE that means that the mods are doing a good job at getting their point across. If they were to ban someone who obeys the rules here but maybe acts out on other forums, what is that ban based on? Maybe their conduct is acceptable on the other forum, so they see nothing wrong with it. Or maybe someone has complained about them. If so, this can be a slippy slope. You have to be careful not to take sides or show favoritism because sometimes it's hard to tell who is right, and who is wrong, especially when getting the information second, third, or fourth hand. Often I've seen instigators complain about 'harrassment' until they get someone banned, when in reality they are the ones who have started it. On the net, sometimes it's hard to distiguish the bully from the victim, and often it goes both ways. Also, when we like a poster it's sometimes hard to see that maybe they are partly to blame for the way others react to them.

From my own experience I think it's best for mods to focus on what happens here, and not elsewhere. Mods are not internet police, their 'powers' are very limited. If there's a problem on another forum, the harrassed person can bring it to the attention of mods there, and if it's on their personal blog or FB or whatever, they have the ability to delete the offensive comments. Also, many forums have an 'ignore' feature, which works well. When you don't respond to or acknowledge the insults, the person will most likely give up. A victim on the internet has far more options when it comes to avoiding a bully then one does in real life, even to the point of walking away from a particular forum or site for awhile until things settle down.

Now, that all said, I see NO problem of a person being banned if the complaining party has evidence of extreme bullying, and in any way feels physically threatened. If someone is being singled out, stalked, and threatened, then I think it is in a moderator's power to protect not just the one person, but the entire forum. This, of course, would go beyond just name calling and the like. A few years back a kid at WWPhilly printed up t-shirts of Bendis getting his throat slit (over the Civil War thing), and even though he (as far as I remember) didn't cause problems here, I believe he was banned from the forum. So, anything extreme like that - regardless of where it happens - should be reason enough to keep someone off the forums.


das

[Matt Doc Martin]

There was a creepy person that co-opted someone else's pic and made a false on identity on Facebook, using a YABS person's picture. I could see banning them in a heartbeat. But there is a slippery slope.

I would be interested to know what is actually happening, even if names were left out.

[Len Snark]

There was a creepy person that co-opted someone else's pic and made a false on identity on Facebook, using a YABS person's picture. I could see banning them in a heartbeat. But there is a slippery slope.

I would be interested to know what is actually happening, even if names were left out.

What is YABS?

[Len Snark]

There was a creepy person that co-opted someone else's pic and made a false on identity on Facebook, using a YABS person's picture. I could see banning them in a heartbeat. But there is a slippery slope.

I would be interested to know what is actually happening, even if names were left out.

What is YABS?

[bert]

What is YABS?

You'll All Be Sorry (YABS). . the board most of us came here from (it was Gail's board on Comic Book Resources. . when she moved here to Benbo, many of us followed her here).


I've tried for over a year to get folks to refer to us as GABS (Gail At Bendis' Site). . but no luck (so far)