Does Fluther take any disciplinary actions against members?

Education, followed by gentle reminders, then written warnings. There are temporary suspensions. Continued bad behavior after suspension may result in a ban.

All depends on the severity of the offense.

I can never achieve the right amount of bad, where I don’t get banned, but @Augustlan has to spank me.

They sometimes suggest that certain users should avoid each other. Each user will receive a pm.

@syz is correct. Our primary course of action is to direct the user to the Guidelines with a reminder about any policy they may have broken. Our second course is a warning that further negative actions could result in a suspension or ban. The third course of action, naturally, is either a suspension or a ban.

All of this is also dependent on how bad the transgression of the individual user is (for example, mass spamming typically results in an immediate, permanent ban), and how colourful their history as a user has been.

Banning a member, other than spammers, is actually pretty rare. Users, non-spammers, don’t just get immediately banned. As others have said, we start with educating the user about what they are doing wrong. If they continue with that behavior, we move on to an official warning that tells them continuing said behavior can lead to suspension and/or ban. If it continues from there, we move to a suspension, which usually lasts 2 weeks. When the user comes back from their suspension, they are again reminded of everything. Continuing the same behavior then leads to being banned. In the 3 years I’ve been a mod, I’ve only seen a handful of non spammer users get banned for behavioral issues.

I was under the impression this was pretty much universal knowledge, amongst medium/long term members at least.

Long ago Fluther took itself very seriously.

It’s understandable that it didn’t want to become the next Youtube or Yahoo Answers. But aspiring to be another http://www.quora.com/ wasn’t possible or necessary.

Before it’s inception I predicted the Social section. I knew it was the only way Fluther would survive. Early mods had little patience for wit.

”So far I have seen that when a member breaks any of the Fluther rules they get banned.” We all break the rules at one time or another, sometimes just by accident or in the heat of the moment. If we got banned every time there would be no one left.

@SecondHandStoke Rarebear showed me to Quora. I tried it. OMG, talk about a corn cob up a butt! Don’t even crack a smile there!

Corn cob.

LOL.

[Mod says]: As mentioned above, very few users are banned. Please remember that users have the ability to delete their own account and there is no way (for regular users) to tell the difference between self deletion and banning. If you have a legitimate question about the banning of a particular user, you can send me or any of the other moderators a message, or use the contact link at the top of the site, which goes to all the mods. Hope this helps. Edited to add: Posts naming names have been removed.

I was promised the business end of @augustlan’s whip once, but (sadly) it was an empty threat.

@cookieman Be careful or I’ll come and eat you up!

in my opinion, auggie & the mods are pretty chill. If you are warned you need to listen.

I got one PM once, and I push the envelope pretty hard. I think the mods do a great job of keeping this orderly with stifling us too much.

@Adirondack I still feel bad for taking up for one guy who was not a good dude. Live & learn, people are sneaky.

I’m a very good judge of people. Yeah, lots of them are sneaky, but a lot are good too.

UAdirondack Kinda harder online for me. My accuracy here is way worse than RL for some reason.

Yep, I was suspended for 2 weeks for going off topic and a little dispute with a long gone member the first few months I was here in 2010. Got the hang of things and have been a relatively model member since. haha

Sometimes they put duct tape on your hindquarters and rip it off quickly removing all of the hair in that strip.

Then they laugh and laugh….....

@rojo: It’s not a laugh, it’s a cackle. LOL

[mod says] Flames off, guys. Please take any issues you have with a particular user to PMs.