Yellow cards

[Jaxspra]

I understand that someone can get a yellow card for being out of line or personally attacking someone. My question is how does it affect you? Is it just to tell a person to get in line or is there something that actually tells mods how many yellow cards a person has? Can you get banned after so many?? Just wondering. Thanks.

[Dan]

I understand that someone can get a yellow card for being out of line or personally attacking someone. My question is how does it affect you? Is it just to tell a person to get in line or is there something that actually tells mods how many yellow cards a person has? Can you get banned after so many?? Just wondering. Thanks.

We don't realy have a Catholic school-style demerit system in place - you know, something like "after X yellow cards, you get a one day suspension, and after X suspensions, we call your parents in for a conference." The yellow cards essentally mean "Hey, [user]. you're trading on thin ice." A warning doesn't have to take a form of a yellow card; some mods might just say "you've been warned," and that's it.

We're starting to keep more accurate records of who's getting formal warnings, and for what. We don't keep track of every little rule violation, though. Like I said, we don't have an "x warnings = something bad will happen to you" demerit system. We don't want to be bogged down with a process where folks will nitpick over whether a proper sequence of disciplinary actions as followed. Things are flexible, and disciplinary action is based on a gut feeling of the mods, with many variables to consider - the frequency of warnings, the severity of the offense, a user's previous positive contributions to the site, and so on.

Here's an example: advertising other Web sites. Today, a user was banned because their first post was only about their bird-related Web site; it looked like guerella marketing to us, and we couldn't tell if that person was going to stick around. If that user posted about their bird-related site in a later post, it wouldn't even be an issue. Content matters; a first post that points someone to their planning or urbanism-related Web site might be seen as okay, if we don't feel it's the action of a one-time "drive-by poster" and it isn't worded like a blatant ad.

EDIT: I've been asked in the past why users with non-working e-mail addresses have their posting privileges suspended. It's to drive them to update their address. If we didn't remove posting privileges, there would be no incentive for members to update their e-mail addresses, and the forum administration e-mail address would eventually be swamped in bounced mail. Because using a bad e-mail address is usually unintentional, we look at it in a different light than ... oh, posting a link to Goatse or something.

[Chet]

Even mods are not exempt from yellow cards and bannings. Ask me, I am a charter member of the clube.