I'm torn here. On one hand, I'm thinking of just dismissing your words, Ethin, because I feel as if you may be deliberately running down rabbit-holes in the hopes that I'll chase you and waste my time. On the other hand, however, I respect that you have a differing opinion, and rather than attack or dismiss or otherwise judge you, I wwant to take apart what you're saying.
If you have a forum, and you ban me for "cumulative behaviour", one of two things is guaranteed. In the first scenario, I will know exactly why you banned me; we will have had plenty of run-ins and there will be evidence to suggest that this was a long time coming. I might still be angry or upset, but I'll agree that this was your right as an administrator, even if I didn't see it coming in the moment. The second scenario is one where you want to get rid of me and cite cumulative behaviour where there is none. If I believed this were the case, I would reach out to you, firmly but politely, and ask you for the details surrounding my punishment. I would expect a courteous response possessing evidence to support your action. If you did not, could not or would not support your action, I would leave, dismissing you as someone who abused power. If you provided some sort of proof to justify your punishment, I would analyze it and act in accordance with the validity of the claims.
All very logical, wouldn't you say?
What I would not do, at any time, is freak out and rail about how unfair the world was. I suspect that most people do things for reasons, and even if I can't see them at the present moment, I want to understand them. So you'd better believe I'd investigate, but I'd do so with the idea that I might in fact have deserved whatever I got.
People who are trying vs. people who are deliberately ignoring warnings. That, in fact, does partially determine how a person should be dealt with in a social medium. This is why plea bargains exist. This is why we are taught to own our actions and to apologize. Frankly, we as people usually find it easier to cope with a wrong if we know the person who committed it is sorry, and/or committed to trying to undoing it or otherwise making good on it. If someone hurts you and you think they genuinely are trying to do better, aren't you apt to give them a bit more leeway than someone who essentially says "yeah, sorry, but I don't care that you got hurt. I don't feel I should have to change."? I suspect that most readers would agree that this is the case. And if it's the case for us as individuals, why would it not be the case for this forum? Perhaps you have, if we tried to somehow total up all your offenses, been deserving of punishment, Ethin; there is little way to objectively quantify this, however, but roll with it for a moment. You are trying to be a good member of this forum. You try and take warnings and admonitions and advice to mind if you can. You are, in point of fact, considerably better than you used to be. This means that working with you instead of just dropping the hammer makes sense. With Ironcross, though, if he has been as resistant as he has outwardly appeared, then that same sense of mutual accommodation is just not going to stretch as far. And that's just how the social world works.
Now, let's talk a little more about Ironcross.
Mods say they had reached out to him before. That's their word. Ironcross says this was minimal. That's his word.
I'd rather believe a team of people trying to be objective than I would a person who by his own admission wants to tell it like it is. Maybe this would be a mistake in some instances, but my instinct here is to trust the word of the administrators until given good reason to do otherwise. I have not, as yet, received such reason.
What is more, I know because I have witnessed it that Ironcross has received many warnings and admonitions in public both from mods and from a few other users as well. This man cannot in good conscience claim ignorance. As such, the exact amount of communication between Ironcross and the moderation team is almost irrelevant. Both sides seem to agree that there was contact and some attempt to mitigate damage being done. That is good enough. Ironcross cannot claim he did not know what he was doing, or that he did not realize he was causing harm in certain cases. The likelihood, based on empirical evidence provided by Ironcross himself, is that he decided, perhaps while angry and in the heat of several moments, to go on behaving the same way. He perhaps did not want to bow to authority, or make gentler his opinions in order to satisfy a protesting few. He did not want to be told what to say and what not to say. I will not speculate upon this further, beyond saying that when you combine all of these details and look at it reasonably, this ban was a long time coming.
And let's finish with a flourish. Cumulative behaviour does not mean that any time anything new happens, you have to go recategorize everything that came before. That is not what the definition said, and any attempt to defend that position is failed sophistry, nothing more and nothing less. Cumulative, in essence, refers to something which is added to. All this means is that several prior situations had been put aside with notes that further behaviour of a similar type would be indication that retaliatory action was indicated. That further action became necessary in the eyes of the mods when Ironcross's antagonism continued unabated. Warnings had been of little to no effect. Prior examples of unacceptable behaviour were remembered and referenced; the exact time it took, and the exact method of reference, are irrelevant.
I'll give a really silly, simple example.
Let's say that you're operating in a social situation where the word "blue" is a bad word, and so is the word "rock". Well, let's say you've used those words a total of twenty-seven times, and we've decided that twenty-eight times means you get in serious trouble. Well, every time you've said "rock" or "blue", I've made a little note of it. And since I'm a reasonable person who knows how to count, I'm keeping track of how close to the edge you're getting. So finally you say it one more time. I do not have to comb my references to see where each and every instance of the words were said before. As long as I trust my bookkeeping - which I do - you're hung. This is a prime example of cumulative behaviour. If you had only said one of those bad words just once, then of course you're not in any trouble. The problem is, you kept doing it. You did it after you had been asked not to. You did it with full knowledge that the behaviour was unacceptable. So you pay the price for willfully going against the way the social system is being run.
I suspect your issue is that there is no hard and fast way by which to measure this sort of bad behaviour. What constitutes a step toward trouble and what doesn't? Are they ever undone with prolonged with good behaviour? How much is too much?
And let me go one step further, myself. Most of the time, in my experience, when people get hung up on details like this, it's not because those details are missing and shouldn't be. it's because they're caught and their platform is busted, and they bloody well know it. In most instances I've seen, the people who want every iota of transgression spelled out are people who are taking exception when someone else finally decided they'd had enough of a certain behaviour. They're usually looking for things to be spelled out so that they can utterly destroy the first person who makes a single misstep in the application of those more specific rules. Furthermore, and perhaps most important, they are often looking for ways to dance around the limitations put on them by said rules. Let's be real here for a moment. Most people who break a community failure clause this way know exactly what they're doing, and they're going to push and push and push no matter how many caveats and clauses you place in the rules. Because it isn't about not knowing where good behaviour ends and bad behaviour begins. It is very demonstrably about saying whatever you think you can, and to hell with whatever conventions are being used to curtail your freedom of speech. Ironcrossed kept on shoving forward, even after repeated warnings. Finally, the mods used their own power and shoved back a little, hopefully helping the community a little in the process.
Check out my Manamon text walkthrough at the following link:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/z8ls3rc3f4mkb … n.txt?dl=1
