BAS and 33anda3rd had some heated arguments in the Politics forum. We felt it crossed the line. The forum was cleaned up and warnings issued, then the arguing continued the next day. We decided to ask both posters to refrain from posting on politics for 1 week as a cool off period.
BAS accepted this, while 33anda3rd responded with some conditions for him to stop posting for a week. I personally decided that negotiating a temporary ban with someone we felt crossed the line was a bad precedent, so I banned him for a week.
When I made the post last week about the bans, I didn't mention that the bans were initially equal but were changed in response to the posters reactions to a temp ban. So it came across that 33 had a harsher ban, which (from my understanding) he took as an insult deep enough to leave the forum for. In hindsight, I should have been more clear on why one poster was banned and one was not, but the intent was always for this to be temporary.
Generally we don't even communicate bans/warnings/etc. publicly, but the forum has had so much bickering lately that I hoped communicating this would help show we're making efforts to stop personal attacks and everyone would keep this in mind while posting. My personal goal is to start the 2020 season with the forum in a position to generate positive posts and good content. In hindsight, I think making the initial public post last week was a mistake. And i'm probably going to regret this post as well. But like I said, i'm trying to be transparent and make sure anyone contacted privately sees what happened from our perspective.
So a couple of final points:
- The mods don't want to ban anyone. Our goal is to keep the forum guidelines in place and make this a community where everyone feels welcome to post without fear of being attacked personally. We know our decisions won't be perfect, but we try our best to make decisions from a moderation standpoint that reinforce that goal.
- The mods try not to treat anyone differently when it comes to how we enforce our forum guidelines. Wether you've got 10k posts or 100, enjoy sabrmetrics or traditional stats, politically lean left or right, etc. If you're following the forum guidelines we want to treat you all the same. In this situation we made our best effort to treat both posters the same, since we felt they both violated the forum guidelines in the same way. Who started it, who is the better poster, who has more friends, etc. is not taken into account.
- No one has been permanently banned by the mods. Both posters above are still welcome on the forum so long as they can follow our forum guidelines. I'll personally be sad to see anyone leave the forum.
- If you have any questions/concerns/comments or feedback for us mods please send any of us a PM. We're trying to do our best, but we want to make sure the community agrees with what we're doing, and that we're on the same page about what can/can't be posted on the forum