Moderation Rules and Decisions

[Kevin Bonham]

User lukuman4u banned for spamming including spamming users by email.

[Kevin Bonham]

Rosario's Blog Discussion 101 - claim of lying deleted, and most of subsequent blather between GG and silly goat bulk-deleted. The words "lie" or "liar" imply not merely that a comment is false but that the person making it knew this. Such comments should only be made where you have strong evidence that the person knows what they are saying isn't true, and this evidence should be stated in the post.

[Kevin Bonham]

Sweeney now banned for a week for continuing to vulgarise a username to harass a poster in the main section of the board despite warnings that there would be a zero-tolerance approach to this habit.

[Kevin Bonham]

A thread containing various gossip/rumour style comments including some defamation has been deleted and the poster warned.

jenni has resigned as moderator following a disagreement with the admins over the deletion of a thread in the Coffee Lounge, and citing more general disagreements of a similar kind.

[Kevin Bonham]

Sweeney banned for ten days for vulgar abuse - the bans will keep getting longer until he is willing to consistently post within the rules.

[skip to my lou]

Modified thread title to "ChessKids Sympathisers Beware: Domain Name "Squatting"" and deleted a post by ggrayggray in that thread.

[Kevin Bonham]

Matthew Sweeney suspended for an indefinite period after various drunken antics including reposting a PM without permission and some typical Sweeney stuff towards a new poster.

This may be a shortish suspension to protect Matthew from his own stupidity, given that if left on he was at risk of posting something that would get him banned for ages, or he may be off for much longer in view of his frequent breaches. In this case I will be discussing his future on the site with the site owner prior to setting a duration for this ban.

Many of you will doubtless think latitude should be shown because of it being Christmas and all, but Matthew has stated that he does not celebrate Christmas so I doubt he has that excuse.

[Kevin Bonham]

Matthew has been reinstated, but in future when he posts in an apparently drunk manner, I intend to suspend him for 24 hrs immediately irrespective of the contents of those posts, since he seems to have even more trouble following the rules in that state than normally.

This may appear to be making a rule for one particular poster but:

(i) many forums have "problem posters" who need to be dealt with individually.

(ii) if another poster develops the same posting characteristics I'll deal with them the same way.

[Kevin Bonham]

Furthermore I would like to make it publicly clear that Matthew is now on a zero tolerance policy with respect to rule breaches. All clearcut rule breaches by Matthew, including trivial ones and ones committed while drunk, will result in bans for a significant period. The current minimum ban period for Matthew for any offence is two weeks. This will be reviewed if Matthew breaches no rules and does not post while drunk for at least three months.

Matthew is actually extremely lucky to have been readmitted as it has come to light that he used extremely inappropriate language in a post on the main board. Had I been aware of just how bad it was before I let him back on, I would have banned him for at least a month.

[Kevin Bonham]

As a result of a constructive suggestion by Matthew Sweeney, the top post in the thread has been consolidated to provide a single up-to-date list of site rules and will be edited as new rules are added. References to UCJ have been removed as UCJ is defunct.

[Kevin Bonham]

Linking to the coffee lounge (or any equivalent, eg "see my reply in the coffee lounge" without any other substantive comment) has been banned. Also see note on unnecessary thread proliferation in rules at top. Matthew Sweeney warned that this practice, which was an obvious attempt to destabilise the site, has now been banned.

[Kevin Bonham]

User account "Anna Kimura" banned and all posts and replies quoting them deleted - defamation, impersonation, off-topic trolling and evading a ban. Based on similarity of posts and IP evidence, this was not the real Miss Kimura but rather the permanently banned poster HappyFriend.

[Kevin Bonham]

Some more HappyFriend sockpuppet accounts have been banned, and we will keep banning them as they appear. If necessary stronger actions will be taken.

[Kevin Bonham]

Ayuna has been banned. HappyFriend told me that he will not be posting on the BB again and that the sockpuppet accounts mentioned above are "hackers". Based on IP evidence and similarity of posts Ayuna is another one of these "hackers". We do not allow people to post by hacking other people's computers so Ayuna has been banned.

On a completely unrelated note, banned users who wish to be readmitted to the bulletin board may not do so by creating a new username or alias. They must contact the moderators with a request for readmission, which will not necessarily be approved.

[Kevin Bonham]

I deleted a bunch of stuff from the Bali Nine thread. Basically one poster swore on the open board, another suggested his language was inappropriate and several posts sprang off from there most of which also contained or quoted swearing inappropriate for the open board. The rest didn't make sense without the deleted posts. Some of these may be reviewed but I felt that since the original poster had toned it down there was no need for the rest to stay up. There was also one post which had a mildly nonworksafe image.