One week ban for sarcastic comment

bajer101

Hi, I received a one week ban from the Politics forum for making a sarcastic comment. No warning, just a straight one week ban. I pm'd the mod but they upheld it and directed me here.

bajer101

<snip>

The Hill Billy

It is a bank holiday Monday. Our CMods probably have real life matters to deal with. I will give them a heads-up that an appeal is waiting to be heard.

Do not make any further pointless posts in this thread.

tHB

bajer101

Ok.

bajer101

Ok, I get it. If I stop being a smart arse I might get my case heard earlier.

I made a harmless, humourous comment that resulted in a week long ban within minutes. When I ask to appeal it, there has been no attempt address the query after two days. Meanwhile I have ben prevented from viewing the Politics forum which has interested me.

There is no reason why this issue hasn't been resolved before now other than a passive aggressive attempt to punish a poster.

dudara

The far simpler explanation is that a CMod has probably not yet had time to look at this. Occam's Razor and all that..

We're not interesting in stopping posters from interacting on this site. I'll remind the CMods again

Toots

bajer101 I will look into this for you. Apologies for the delay in responding, however with the long weekend (as The Hill Billy pointed out) I had family commitments that kept me away from the site.

Please allow me some time to investigate, and in the meantime could you forward me on any PMs that you sent/received in relation to this? You can either forward the PMs to me directly, or else post them in this thread, whichever is easiest.

bajer101

Regardless of the outcome of this case, I think there is a big problem where a Mod can issue a lengthy ban with no warnings, and the ensuing appeals process will take longer to resolve than the initial ban. This is problematic and will result in the appealer tending to accept a "time served sentence".

My big problem here is that I received a ban within minutes of making a comment but my appeal took days to be heard.

Toots

bajer101 wrote: »

Regardless of the outcome of this case, I think there is a big problem where a Mod can issue a lengthy ban with no warnings, and the ensuing appeals process will take longer to resolve than the initial ban. This is problematic and will result in the appealer tending to accept a "time served sentence".

My big problem here is that I received a ban within minutes of making a comment but my appeal took days to be heard.

It just so happened that the mod was online at the same time as you posted that comment, and was monitoring the thread at the time. It could just as easily have been hours later, depending on who was online at the time.

As regards the time it took to hear your appeal, weekends are always a lot quieter on boards and a lot of posters wouldn't be online. Mods/Cmods/Admins are volunteers and aren't online 24/7, it was a bank holiday weekend and possibly a lot of people are away. It would be the same if it had been Christmas etc. Usually appeals are acknowledged sooner, however there's no guaranteed resolution time. Depending on the case, there can be a lot of work in investigating the background into why a card/ban was issued, and (particularly in the case of 1 day bans) it often simply isn't possible to have it resolved within a 24-48 hour period.

However, this thread is to deal with the appeal of this particular ban, as opposed to the overall structure of Dispute Resolution. If you want to raise that as an issue it would need to be done in either the Helpdesk or Feedback, I'm not 100% sure which would be best, so I'll double check it and let you know.

edit: I've checked and you would need to start a thread in the Help Desk.

Toots

OK, I've looked into your ban and spoken to the Politics mods.

I understand that you may not have meant anything by it, your comment was trolling. Anyone reading that thread would know how much work the mods are putting in trying to keep it on track, and remarks like that in response to a mod warning are disruptive and just not appropriate.

While I do think it did warrant a ban, I feel that a week was a bit harsh. I've discussed it with the Politics mods, and they are in agreement, so I'm going to lift your ban early - you should have access to the Politics Forum again in the next hour or so. When you return to the forum, please bear my comments above in mind.

bajer101

Thanks