you get a friendly "Points Infraction" PM. then it will ALWAYS appear when you acces your User Control Panel

 

It's been brought up before and the admins, site mods, and owner have discussed it at length several times. The system has worked well and it has resulted in more even-handed enforcement, FJF's pleas not withstanding.

Your 2 warnings and 1 infraction last year won't affect you in any way, as I'm guessing you realized you couldn't do whatever it is you were doing.

 

You'll get a PM, and e-mail notification of the PM if you have that option enabled.

Other users can't see your infractions, but all moderators can, and a user's history is part of the consideration when deciding on warnings vs infractions.

 

What was the consensus and/or reasonings behind not allowing MINOR offenses to drop with time? Just curious...

-E

 

A major problem with expiring points is it won't deal with serious offenders. It's not that uncommon for someone to rack up a series of infractions over the span of a week, they get enough to get a one day ban, come back, get enough for a three day ban, come back and get enough for a two week ban. Eventually they work their way up to a month or 6 month ban. If points expired every 6 months of "good behaviour", anyone who was given a 6 month ban would automatically have their slate effectively wiped clean and the cycle would simply begin a new.
Evom isn't a democracy and more importantly, the idea of a jury is flawed because 99% of members don't give a rat's *** and the other 1% would be divided between the mods and the regulars. We also don't have the time to review every case individually as if we are giving someone the death penalty, mods are not paid and we have better things to do than decide as a group whether someone should be banned.
As a whole mods are pretty consistent and that's part of why the points system is so nice, it allows us to track a member's history and see whether they've encountered another mod and how that turned out. Do we have differences of opinion? Of course but you get that in any legal system (if you wanted to call evom infractions a legal system). Cops are never 100% consistent so to ask it of some volunteers on an online forum is ridiculous.

 

Agreed. I just think that a slight adjustment to the rule is about due. A revisit to the rules to make sure they are covering everything acceptable. And to let some of us new members have a discussion about them. I think it would be healthy for the community.

Say after a so many months of no infractions, have the points dewindle in amount. With the current rulings, if a member had 2 5 point infraction over a 2 year period, the member would get banned for a day. Even though the same member went 2 years without issue.

My suggestion would be after 6-12 months, the points accured in that time frame would be reduced. Say if the member got a 5 pointer, and then went 6 months with out infractions, they would get 1/2 the points back and after a year the remaining points. Or something simialar to that.

 

There's no benefit to it, as it somewhat defeats the purpose of the point system. The general perception is that it's just a way for moderators to pick on certain people, but in truth it's primarily a record keeping system for a large staff who can't effectively communicate everything they see. It just so happens that when the moderators log a warning/infraction, the user actually knows about it, and can either alter the behavior, or whine about it on the Site Suggestions and get banned when they do it again.

The ultimate decider, I think, was that there were a small number of users who were repeatedly, over the course of 2-3 years, committing the same violations. You had to do a lot to get the attention of a moderator, so some people were getting banned for certain offenses and others were getting completely looked over. It was hard for every moderator to remember every trouble maker, so things were overlooked as being "no big deal", but those "no big deal" infractions when done over and over ARE a big deal.

 

Amby-

I respect you post. Here's the flaw I think I've found in your argument:

We are NOT asking for a "clean slate". We are asking for point expires on the minor offenses. Such as, Off Topic points and things of that nature.

You are right in that scenario occuring. I say we LEAVE the serious offenses because that kind of offense is absurd and should be taken to the death chamber anyways.

What about this suggestion? Keeping record of ALL offenses (for the mods, admins) to refer back to in ditching out penalties for future offenses. Kind of like when you get probation and if you violate it you get the previous offense plus the new offense added?

I'm playing Devil's Advocate here and sucking at it...

-E

 

I see that the concept of consistency isn't in the works. This most likely illustrates why you're able to flame an individual, award him points, yet leave yourself immune to any comparable recourse. The rules should apply to everyone equally, not just to those without a mod tag.

BTW, I was done with this. Why did you feel the need to troll me back in? Amazing.

 

I don't personally think any changes to the system are necessary. If members have no plans on breaking the rules, how many points they have is irrelevant as they won't accrue any more. Making points expire or offering rewards for good behaviour will only benefit those who habitually push and break the rules.

 

Thank you...

-E

 

This is a very interesting and constructive conversation... I am actually learning something here...

-E

 

Respected and duly noted...

-E

 

Generally speaking, serious offenders are not stupid and they know how to push just hard enough to annoy but not to actually step over the line. If we made certain infractions expire, they would simply resort to those. As an example, rather than call someone a flaming bag of used horse penises, they'd just post off-topic junk in a thread thus destroying it but not getting the flaming infraction but rather the off-topic infraction.
A probation idea could work but in practice no one will pay attention to it and that's somewhat the purpose of giving warnings anyways.

 

Consider a user that repeatedly derails otherwise good threads, maybe 2/month. Why should they get a clean slate after a while? How many times does someone need to be told what they're doing isn't allowed before it sinks in?