Moderators?

Well it seems that a moderator has baned a very promenent moder on the grounds that his signature was too long.

Now as a warning he/she edited my signature witch may I add has been around for over a year and does not breack forum rules. And i did not even get a pm asking or informing me about the edit.

It seems that someone loves to piss modders off. And i seriously hope you guys either get this fixed or im afraid after some time this place is going to shrink and go the way the modfathers have gone.

I get the message from whoever did that. It seems that anyone who speaks out against a tantrum a moderator has, they are allowed to beat on regular forum goers (majority of the trafic).


Sad. is all I can say.

 

I believe that there was actually a lot more to it than that.

He had his signature shortened because it was too long - the perpetrator then put his signature back to the way that it was, even though it was deemed to be too long. The moderator concerned then sent a personal message to the person concerned asking him to be more reasonable about the length of his signature.

I don't know what the signature looked like before, but the personal message that was returned to the moderator was, well, rather unacceptable. There are over 20,000 members on this forum and it is far from easy to moderate the forums without upsetting people from time to time. If you have a problem with the actions of a moderator, there's a team page - you are welcome to contact any of us on there.

In fact, please do contact me, as I'd like to know if you have an issue with the way that the forums are moderated. I'd just recommend that you don't publicly retaliate to a moderator's actions whether you feel they are right or wrong because you'll only serve to upset them if, as in the case of this person, were not doing as they were asked to do. In fact, the way that the person reacted was childish and completely uncalled for.

I stand 100% behind my moderator's decision. I can understand that the forum member is upset that he is told to reduce his signature, but that doesn't give him the grounds to react in the way that he did. The fact his signature was too long was not the reason he was given a 7-day ban - the reason he was given a 7-day ban is because of the way he reacted in the aftermath.

 

Oh , OK ... Just as long as that moderator didn't do anything childish as well.

What is a reasonable sig. length , is there a number of caricters long it needs to be? (it does not say)

DB

 

It is not related to the number of characters, it is related to how it appears on screen. Four lines at 1280pix wide is plenty, IMHO.

The point is that a signature shouldn't take up more space on the screen than an average length post. I'd say the average post length is around 4-6 lines if you disregard the single liners. Further expanding on this, a signature should be unobtrustive - if it starts to become obtrusive (i.e. excessively long or with excessively large text, bigger than size=2) then you can expect us to start actioning.

We don't ask a lot from you guys, but we do ask that you do what a moderator asks of you. If you feel that what they have asked is unreasonable - as I mentioned above - please email me so that I can address the matter with the parties concerned and weigh up both sides of the disagreement.

 

Dude my signature was minimal text size and was a bit over 8lines (about 9 as I remember it.) Like I said it was minimal size and the mod deleted it. Point being is that there are signatures autthere that are allot more anoying and less organised than a list of text but its unresnoble to pick on me because I pointed out what the mod di to another one who had a signature of 6 lines.

You guys help but this is rediculus. My signature has been fine for the last 1000 or so posts but all of a suden its unaceptable? Take the moderators hat off and come back to earth you guys are no better than I or anybody else. (I used to be a mod on another room) And let me tell ya if you treat people badly they are going to retaliate and it would be a good starting point to apologise to tribaloverkill publikly and reinstate my signature.

Geez another stuck up mod whats next?

 

jaguarking11.. it might help if you use the handy tool called the Search Function.
http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=96154

You can replace your signiture, just make sure to keep it smaller. There's alot of signitures being nuked on the forum... trust me, I know this. And tribaloverkill could have fixed his sigs by removing the return after every site listed instead of having them on seperate lines.

:EDIT: Your signiture was nuked at the same time tribaloverkill's signiture was nuked. There's pretty much always been the 4-6 lines rule for signitures (people's sigs have been nuked for as long as I can remember on here) and it's been getting out of hand lately with signitures five times the size of a normal post. It seems that signiture size is now equating to e-penis size nowadays.

 

IMHO , You shouldn't have to use a "Search Function" when your looking at the "FAQ / Rules" page , to find a FAQ / Rule ...
If " Four lines at 1280pix wide is plenty, IMHO " than shouldn't it be posted there ?

DB

 

For the record, the linked "rules" has no content on what is acceptable as a sig and what isn't:

How long is a piece of string?

I'm not trying to flame, just pointing something out

btw bindi, i think you mean "1280" as in 1280x960 or 1280x1024? everytime i read "1240" it just irritates me, lol

 

4 times half way to the middle

 

If you get caught breaking the rules, I'm not sure that it is acceptable defence to argue that other people break rules too. And if you challenge people, you have to expect that they will respond to that. That is not "picking on".

Look, it's OK to feel passionate about things, but I do wish people would not make it a personal issue every time they are challenged on their opinion (particularly if their opinion is a challenge in the first place!). This is not personal. This is about house rules.

We need house rules to keep this fairly huge forum (20897 members and counting) a relatively pleasant and organised place for people to visit, from hard-core seasoned modders to the newbie who perhaps has never visited a single forum before today and doesn't know netiquette. We have to cater to people with tiny 15" screen setups chugging along on basic PCs with dial-up connections as well as to those with crisp, graphic accelerated 20" TFTs on ninja-gear and warpspeed broadband. We have people from different countries with varying degrees of mastery of the English language, different cultural backgrounds, different temperaments. We just try to run a smooth site acommodating for all those variables.

And you know what? All this comes to you for free. But this isn't a free setup. It all costs money, time and effort: sever hosting and maintenance, keeping the site running and up-to-date, managing and moderating the forums so you guys don't get spammed to death with free ipod schemes, hard-core porn or offensive insults and death threats from people whose opinion on some fairly trivial technical detail you dared to disagree with. We try to make this a pleasant place for people to hang out, and as a member you could consider it your civic duty, so to speak, to help maintain a bit of law and order. If you see someone in your street being a drunken nuisance at 3.00am, you might consider calling the cops, right? You wouldn't take it as an invitation to do the same. You wouldn't challenge the police while they are trying to defuse a bar brawl, right? You wouldn't escalate the conflict by chiming in on who you thought started it all. Same thing.

People are quite right that perhaps the official Forum Rules should specify concretely what is considered a "reasonable length" for a signature. It is just too bad that nowadays we seem to need to spell out what is reasonable... ...but we will look into it.

 

None of us want a long list of detailed Rules & Regulations. 99% of members have enough common sense and social grace to fit in with their community by watching how things are done by responsible members of it. There's no need to spell everything out that's over the boundary.

But there's that other 1% wannabe rebels... It's a moderator's job to keep their anarchy down to a moderate level. Do what you like in your own place, but don't come here and piss on the carpet.

 

If you can say with a straight face that that's a mature and sensible attitude to take, and that it's us trying to piss him off, then I think this thread is over, as you're obviously not going to listen to any other kind of sense

 

Why the hell does a signature matter to you so much anyway? I have them turned off so I don't have to read quotes from members' random msn convos or 'mod completion progress bars'. I don't mind what people put in them but why treat the situation like your life depends on it? It's just a footer on a forum run by someone other than you so don't get in such a huff over it

<A88>

 

Was that long tribal overkill blackout sig his original, or what he retaliated with? I mean, the sig he uses over at our place is a collection of links, short and concise, no issues there.

 

It was, but we have rules and he could have easily split down the sites with a | rather than a line carriage.

 

Kameleon ...
bigz ..........

Thank you for clearing that whole thing up

I still think it would be best if a 6 (or 4) line max. / text size1 , Sig. rule be stated in the FAQ / Rules section
but Tribaloverkill's response was wrong and he was wrong to do it

again , thanks

DB

 

Just to recap, so we can all let it go now:

1. Bindibadgi circulated a clear warning that from now on, sigs that are too long will be shortened without prior notice. The reason is because this issue occurs so frequently that it has become impossible to stay on top of it any other way (so, yes, people will occasionally find members "whose sig is longer than mine").

2. When Tribaloverkill's sig was moderated, he changed it back. He knows quite well that it is a breach of the rules, and a bannable offence, to cancel out a moderator's amendment.

3. His sig was changed again and he was sent a PM explaining the situation (note he already had passed the bannable offence stage then, but we wanted to give him a break). He responded by making a provocative long sig (seen above) and sending a rude PM telling the mods to "grow up" and stop being "stupid".

4. He was banned for 7 days.

5. He then proceeded to complain expansively on five other forums about the unfairness of it all (one if which I moderate also; we had to do a fair bit of cleaning up there).

6. He was banned permanently.

I hope this clarifies matters for everyone.

 

Nexxo.... we want you in the IRC channel.

and it was six other forums, but who's counting

 

No IRC, because that would imply a discussion, which this is not subject to.

 

Wow. Not be a dick, but this almost seems childish to me.

Over at my other internet forum place if your sig is too long or big it will tell you. There's a length and line limit as well. Just an idea, but maybe something like that would be safer in the future so everyone can avoid this pointless and un-needed bickering

edit: Just noticed mt sig was screwed with too...