How do you handle warnings and infractions? How many chances or opportunities do you give? Do you have a rock-solid system where a user gets a warning for breaking a rule (no matter how severe or not the rule is) and then subsequent misbehavior dictates an infraction? I'm curious to know how you guys manage this aspect.
We have them, and at the mo only admins can give them out. We have a 3 day ban, a 30 day ban and a perm banned based on how many they get
3 infractions for breaking more serious rules and then auto-banned for one week, if they do this again depending on the seriousness then it is a permanent ban. We do like to warn rather than infract, that is the thing, a lot of members start becoming angry, cheeky and insulting after giving an infraction and then end up getting the rest of their infractions and an auto-ban.
I'm quite against using infractions as a punishment to be honest, as I've found that some staff members feel the need to abuse such a system to the fullest extent. Yes, I could indeed restrict use to myself, but to be fair, I tend to just not use it at all. I've found verbal warnings to be the most effective. If that fails to work, then the ban hammer is always fun to use.
That's certainly a justifiable point, Chris. But how do you easily keep track of all members' past actions, warnings and mishaps? Do you just use the notes feature (if you use vB) or what?
I actually keep a Word document of all problems that I've had with the members of my community. I'm an extremely organized person - I have everything in a file in a particular format. It's amazingly amusing! :p
I'm an extremely organized person as well. Borderline OCD, if you will. Honestly, I believe my moderators think I'm crazy. A team of five moderators plus myself makes it extremely difficult to remain consistent and efficient. But I have ensured my moderators are able to follow my procedural guidelines to a T. They really do think I'm crazy as there are so many little minute details that must be paid attention to when taking moderator actions. Do you have moderators or do you handle all user warnings and user affairs on your own?
You sound like me. I do indeed have a team of moderators to assist me in dealing with problem members, and luckily, they do a fantastic job when it comes to following my complex guidelines. The only real issue that I've had is staff members getting a bit too involved in personal debates and arguments. Other than that, I have no worries whatsoever.
It all depends really, spam bots and spammers get perm ban right off the bat. I'm talking those people who post free pills thread by the dozen. The rest is base on basic 3 strikes and your out system. But thankfully all my members get along really well.
RCTgo has a number of predefined warnings, but I've never used any of them - most of them are pretty extreme, anyway. I've only given one warning so far, which didn't even use one of the predefined warning types, and was only last week. In the case that a user ever does get a high enough warning level for it to matter, we have automatic moderation of new posts at 50% for one week, suspension of posting privileges at 80% for one week, and a one week ban at 100%. Most times, however, any corrections are done without an official warning through PM. I don't have any defined way to keep track of this, however, because we don't have too many problems at this point.
I manage a forum created by a friend which is invite only and has recently reached half a million posts (hooray). It was started in 2007 as a place to "rebel" against a forum which people thought unfairly banned and was too strict blablabla. While there is no rivalry between the forums, and frankly that whole thing is long forgotten (well, not entirely but whatever :p) the forums started a sort of "anything goes" policy. As such, we rarely ban or warn members as there's really rarely a reason to do that. It's a very tight knit community. Really the only rule we have and enforce is that if you're going to post something that is NSFW, it needs to go in NSFW tags. It's a pretty unique place, but I think it goes against almost every forum standard. But hey, it works and everyone is happy (for the most part).
In my opinion Admins should be the only people who can distribute warnings and infractions. Obviously if your forum has millions of posts, you may need to relax this a bit. Simply, on the first offense you get a warning, second offense you get a 7 day ban, third offense permanent ban. Some things do warrant an instant permanent ban. Like for example I will not stand for child pornography. If anything like this comes past my eyes I will do more than ban, but I will also do my best to contact the users ISP.
I just recently found myself contacting a member's ISP - it was highly effective. This member (who was very young) decided that it would be fun to post 1,000+ duplicate SPAM messages within a fairly short period of time. Rather than using the ban hammer on this "person", I (along with fellow staff members) decided to contact his ISP and resolve the situation from there. Needless to say, we haven't heard from him since.
I use the infractions...but only for foul language..we have avery clean forum swearing wise and we pride ourselves on this. Usually petty swearing is edited or we ask the member to edit their own post to keep them in the loop but blantant foul mouthed swearing that can be seen as offensive gets an infraction . Then if they repeat then they close the door on the way out.. ..simple as. We get ocassional spamming but 99% human and not automated bots as vbulletin is good that way with it's re-capture etc..
I'm pretty much 3 strikes and you're out. Outside of spammers which are perma-banned, all members get 4 strikes, many get many more than that with polite PMs telling them to play nice. I have an addendum to my TOS which lays out the 'disciplinary guidelines' you can read them here if you'd like: Our DJ Talk - DJ Help and Resources Chat! Disciplinary Protocol
Unfortunatelythere are some members that just register on your forum to create trouble. Most of the time they are kids who's parents let them run wild and don't supervise them.
