Forum rules???

[mingshi]

Under what condition would one get banned from the KW forums?

[Old Warrior]

When you offend the moderators who have the discretion and power to delete your posts. It's called the Golden Rule - he who has the gold makes the rules.

[Hongsermeier]

I believe when you make very rude comments about the moderators continually. If we give each other crap it's ok. Mostly meant in jest anyway. I have meet some of the people from here and laughed about what was said here.
The other half of the question is if your banned, can you get back on? Would a appology across the entire board help? I assume your asking this for Confound? :cross_eye

[Winter_Wolf]

Hello,
NOOOO! Mingshi has shattered the calm of the flames forum. It's the end of the world! AaAaAaAh!!!! **cough** hrrm, sorry... Seriously though, can someone get back on after being banned? Is this the last we've seen of Confound?
Thanks,
W.W.

[mingshi]

Mr Hongsermeier,

No. You are wrong. Neither me nor the late Confound would bother participating in a forum that welcome trolling more than anything else. Notice how many people have restrained or even stopped posting in these few months of troll-epidemic already?

Also, I don't think posting and responding private messages in the forum is in any case right.

Salute.

[Hongsermeier]

Mr Hongsermeier???

Thank you for the politeness Mingshi. I am glad to still see you posting here. If you have a way of chating with Confound tell her hello.

I have not noticed a drop off of posts. I didn't check on posts Sat, but did on Sun only to recieve 90+ posts in 33 different threads. :cross_eye

[M.K. Kawai]

The Golden Rule is never publicly insult the moderators. They have a thankless job. It's hard enough trying to run a forum and keep it from crashing. Then toss in moderating the forum.

With regard to Confound. I saw this one coming a mile away. The first tip off was when Alex posted in General Chat about an email that he had received from Confound. That thread is locked now, but it set the stage for what would eventually happen.

The "last straw" came when she insulted the moderators publicly on the "re-educating mr.kurukuru" thread. If memory serves, it took a couple of days before the moderators banned Confound.

Now, general protocol that moderators follow is that if a post is found to be questionable the moderators hold a "meeting" about the post. They discuss among themselves what the problem is. Then they send an email to the poster to try and resolve this problem. If the problem cannot be resolved, the moderators "meet" again and make a decision. In this case, Confound was banned.

Now what happened between the time that Confound posted and was told to edit her post to having her banned is between the moderators and Confound.

My guess is that there were a series of emails that occured and the issue was not resolved.

Will Confound be reinstated? I don't know. What I do know is that she had posted something that ended up getting her banned.

MKK

[aru-ma]

Didnt posting blatant sexist or racist comments gets you banned as well?
I think someone was banned for making an extremely sexist post, I think its the "kendo is for men" only post. cant remember who it was though

[AlexM]

Originally posted by aru-ma
Didnt posting blatant sexist or racist comments gets you banned as well?
I think someone was banned for making an extremely sexist post, I think its the "kendo is for men" only post. cant remember who it was though

The infamous don_lubo was not banned (you can check his name out in the members registry) despite his ridiculously sexist and moronic opinions. Of course, he never dared to ask to be banned outright.

I leave to go fishing for 3 days and one of my favorite posters gets yanked from boards. Bummer.

The boards are still interesting but the level of discourse has definitely dropped a notch in the last few months as have the quality of the flames: The arguments about kamae and the use of tsuki never seemed to degenerate into calling people gay for some reason...

Still, can't go to e-budo.com... can't understand what the hell they're talking about.... :confused:

[KENSHIN]

It seems it is all double standards to me. There has been enough reason to ban certain people on these boards for their trolling behaviour (I will not mention names as its pretty obvious of who I speak), nevertheless, nothing was ever done about it. On most other forums trolling is always seen as something wrong, and usually ends up with a ban. But it seems the ROC is a little vague, on what can be done on these boards. Ok, most will argue that insulting the moderators was the wrong thing to do, which it is. However, I am pretty sure those insults made by Confound were a result of inaction of the moderators from someone who seems to like this forum as a place to find information regarding kendo, and then to see nothing done about it when troller’s are doing stupid things on these boards, I guess it would give enough reason to make anyone angry. Even I was a little surprised when I saw the amount of rubbish on these forums, and thought to myself why the moderators were not doing anything about it. I actually thought that the moderators were away from these boards because of “real life” matters that they were attending to or something. Then when I recently saw that the moderators were actually very active on these boards it really came as a shock to me as to why the moderators had done nothing about certain posts and threads.

[Inouye02]

i'm not sad ,because i dont care , she pretty much asked for it , she had a whole lot of issues that girl , from reading her web site , she was tweaked ...

[JSchmidt]

"Under what condition would one get banned from the KW forums?"

Insulting the moderators is a good start. As for the trolls, yes they are annoying, but rather harmless....as the saying goes...dont feed the trolls.Confound on the other hand, went out of her way to insult people or ideas she didnt like, to the extent of using it as a topic-line of one of her threads.
Do you really think that Confound was unfairly treated, Jenny?.

Jakob

[KENSHIN]

Originally posted by JSchmidt
As for the trolls, yes they are annoying, but rather harmless...

Well from the chaos that has been caused by these trolls, it seems these trolls are a bit more than what you define as being harmless, mate.

[ben]

Doe anyone have her website's address?

[Alex]

The Moderators pay their own money to keep this forum going, but more importantly the magazine. All this amounts to is three full time jobs at once, two of which we are virtually paying for the privilige.

There will be others banned as we've decided to take a hard line (Although we tried not to for the longest time.) The whole purpose of this forum being set up was to provide a place where people could come for some civil conversation about kendo related things. Now it has degenerated into a free-for-all with idiots bent on bringing the whole tone down. We will be weeding them out one by one, as it is making a mockery of all our hard work. The obvious place to start is with absolute idiots who presume to actually insult us. THAT INCLUDES PRIVATE MESSAGES so deal with it!

If you don't like the job we're doing, please don't even bother to come here. It's all really quite simple.

[Paburo]

hongsermeier, it's not really the number of post what has decreased. is the quality of them. now most messages are of the flaming and the 'irrelevant chat between colleages who train together' type.

ben, there you go:

http://teral.blerk.org/


about rules and banning,

i'm quite tempted to start a democratic thread/poll about which posters should be banned from KWF. a poll where all posters could cast their vote. i'm sure confound wouldn't be in the first place.

i think it's not wise to stir up things even more now though. we shall sit and wait the development of this 'weeding' process and hope the forum returns to a normal level of civility soon.

[Winter_Wolf]

Hello,
Well, my question to the mods would be do you intend to move all of the other flame threads (and dare I say all of the Hai_hai polls?) into this forum so that visitors don't notice what a mess was caused by the flame wars (orginal name huh?) or will they still be there cluttering up the other forums?
Thanks,
W.W.

[Alex]

No we don't intend to do that. Threads have a habbit of dying out any way. Hopefully people would have got the idea now and will start pulling their horns in. Future cancerous growths will be watched, and cut out if they start getting out of hand. As far as starting stuff in the Flames Section (aka Kendo World Sin Bin), do what you like. Just keep the rest clean. Please. We are all adults?

[KENSHIN]

Why is it you don't just simply lock those theads? intstead of hoping that they will simply die out.

[Phlebas]

"Why is it you don't just simply lock those theads? intstead of hoping that they will simply die out." -- KENSHIN

That's a great idea. I second the motion! There's so much good information and advice in this forum. Locking the useless threads would put them out of sight even faster, making the useful stuff even more accessible. I know, I know... I myself started a useless thread, but my annoyance got the better of me. A rare thing, as anyone who knows me can attest, and now I'm forever immortalized in the "Flames" section of KWF! : (

I vote we lock up the useless threads, and if others found something useful about a locked thread, they can start another thread and continue discussing what they thought was relevant. This forum has been a positive BOON for someone like me and I hope we can return to the way it was months ago when I first joined. There's still a lot of good stuff here, but I feel people are hesitant to post these days...

[Kingu]

Originally posted by Paburo
about rules and banning,

i'm quite tempted to start a democratic thread/poll about which posters should be banned from KWF. a poll where all posters could cast their vote. i'm sure confound wouldn't be in the first place.

i think it's not wise to stir up things even more now though. we shall sit and wait the development of this 'weeding' process and hope the forum returns to a normal level of civility soon. [/B]


I for sure wouldn't have voted Confound in such a poll. I always felt that reactions to her posts were exagerated; even if she sometimes talked harshly, I don't remember having felt any REAL nastiness from what she wrote. Sometimes sarcasms are taken too seriously...

Her remark about moderators of these forums were probably the only one I would completely disagree with. But wouldn't a few members have taken this website as their playground, including sexist, homophobic statements and other stupidities (this for weeks), I'm quite certain she wouldn't have gone so far.

I myself thought a more severe treatment was necessary for these trolls. If things go this way, I guess this site will become again the pleasant one it was when I registered a few months ago. You know, the good old days, when Confound was there...

[Inouye02]

paburo and his hot creamy lesbo's will be first ..

[William Honda]

Rules: a difficult job for Alex and Hamish. Two are very obvious 1. Do not insult the moderators 2. Do not threaten anyone for any reason.

The question that begs to be asked is who are the trolls? Take for example the people who are complaining, criticizing, whining i.e. judging. A third party comes in only to say some Bulls—t about Americans. Who is the troll? Who incites the comebacks and arguing? If the posts are valid subject driven responses (with flaming), is it trolling?

Alex and Hamish have an unenviable job. It is their forum and their rules, even if some of the rules are not obvious. But do not think that some you are absolved.

There is less than a handful that do not degrade themselves to flaming and arguments. The rest of us, beware. Alex and Hamish will keep us guessing I would bet.

[Kingu]

Originally posted by Inouye02
paburo and his hot creamy lesbo's will be first ..


This can't be helped.

[Hai_hai]

I'm pretty amazed that the moderators have time to moderate this bulletin board, unless it's a break for Alex and Hamish from their usual schedule of playing video games, surfing the web, e-mailing friends, and taste testing new beers for 8 hours a day.

[Hongsermeier]

Hai Hai....are you trying to be the next confound? Some peoples kids. :cross_eye

[Sir Percy]

Some other forums that use this format, www.refugeforums.com - dedicated to duck and goose hunting comes to mind, have individual moderators for each section. For example, bogu, shinai, etc. would have their own moderators. Sections with fewer posts such as naginata would have their own moderator. Duck hunters refuge has over 15,000 members and 100s of thousands of posts and functions very smoothly.

Just a thought.

[chidokan]

bring back Confound, some of the stuff she came out with was brilliant! It helps to have a few people like that to make me feel superior...:laugh: :rolleyes:
Have you thought she may be like that through living in Japan too long..???? it'd drive me mad for sure...:confused2


Tim Hamilton

[Hongsermeier]

chidokan...have you been to her web page? Seems to me she has been like that for a long time. She has a lot of issues to work out. :cross_eye

[Kuri]

Her assertations were err... interesting! Remember hiki-tsuki?!?! Too bad she couldn't (can't) view things with a wider prospective. Her loss.

[Kiki]

Recently a friend and I were talking about Kendo World and naturally the forums came up. Although he hadn’t been in the forum for a very long time the first question he ask was “Is Confound still there?”. I said “yes” only to come in Monday and find her gone. I haven’t been on long enough to judge but I felt Confound had some interesting points and questions in spite of her so called “issues”. It was too bad she allowed herself to be lead to her demise by her antagonists.

I read somewhere once:
“The one who makes you angry controls you.”

[Phlebas]

“The one who makes you angry controls you.”

How true! Well said, Kiki. I also feel that Confound made some valuable contributions to several threads I have followed -- I only wish she had been able to stay her tongue when it came to a disagreement with the moderators, then she could have continued to share this forum. I hope we don't lose any more experienced kendoka this way...

[Inouye02]

experienced? in what ?

[nodachi]

A lot of people are suggesting locking up threads that are becoming flame wars or moving them to the flame section or banning people. However something everyone is forgetting is that these things take a lot of effort and time and as the moderators said, they already have 2 other jobs going on in addition to this one.

I have a suggestion, but it requires a lot of trust in people just based upon the internet personalities they have put forth here, but it has worked for other forums I read with large posting and viewing forum participants. There aren't a lot of moderators to patrol this forum. As you've said, you are busy. Some forums in these situations take a few members who have been on the boards for a long time and have lived up to be rather trustworthy and polite in their time on the forum and make them a small subcommittee of moderators. They have weaker or no powers to boot people, but they discuss amongst each other as a committee posts and posters that are detrimental to the forum and either summit the offenders to those in charge or remove the offenders themselves if they are given the power to delete users. They could just do little changes by finding offensive individual posts and deleting the offensive posts instead of locking entire threads and removing whole users.

Now I am not advocating that I be on this committee because I have fallen into the muck a few times, for which I apologize, but if there is someone with a muck/flame free record that the moderators trust, maybe this committee idea would save you guys some effort. They could do all the policing for you. I know there is a "report this post to a moderator" button, but that still provides excess work for you guys that you could delegate to this committee to help you guys with the forum.

Just a thought, take it or leave it. As always, the forum still rocks!

[Alex]

Originally posted by Phlebas
“The one who makes you angry controls you.�E

How true! Well said, Kiki. I also feel that Confound made some valuable contributions to several threads I have followed -- I only wish she had been able to stay her tongue when it came to a disagreement with the moderators, then she could have continued to share this forum. I hope we don't lose any more experienced kendoka this way...

Jeez, you make it sound like we're real Facists! Confound didn't get banned because we had a disagreement! She was banned because she was rude, arrogant, racist, and downright insulting to the very people who are making this whole thing possible in the first place. "Experienced Kendoka" as you put it, would never behave in this way (one would hope), so I can't see it happening to too many other people unless they're really stupid.

[Phlebas]

Alex: Please don't misunderstand... I agree she stepped over the line. Knocking you guys was un-called for; it's your forum after all. I'm just saying that she wasn't ALL nettles and vinegar, and she contributed to a few threads I read, and I'm sorry all this has happened. I have learned a lot from KWF, and I'm sorry to lose another voice... one that _DID_ contribute, once upon a time. Which is more than I can say for myself, as I don't have years and years of experience, as she did.

I got sucked into the muck, as a few of us did, and there were others who were "rude, arrogant, racist, and downright insulting" but not to her extreme. Never bite the hand that feeds you! Even I know that. : )

[James]

Originally posted by Kiki
It was too bad she allowed herself to be lead to her demise by her antagonists.

I agree it was too bad she got herself banned.
But she wasn't lead anywhere, she was pretty much self-propelled.

[aru-ma]

Originally posted by James

But she wasn't lead anywhere, she was pretty much self-propelled.

Well for one thing, it was entirely her fault that she felt that she had the need to make rude insulting replies some of the time and couldnt just igonre it, guess some people just couldn't help themselves.

[Hai_hai]

Originally posted by Hongsermeier
Hai Hai....are you trying to be the next confound? Some peoples kids. :cross_eye

No, those were jokes, not direct insults at the moderators. I do know what they do during the day.

[roar]

I am not surprised that confound is banned, but I am surprised that other people has not been banned as well. Occasionally, she raised interesting questions, and she showed an basic interest in developing her knowledge about the three arts that she practised, behind all the anger and aggression. There has been others, with little or no actual experience with japanese swordwork, who just troll around, to make noise and fill up the forum with rubbish.
Its true that the golden rule is that the one with the gold makes the rules, but every offender should be treated the same. There are lots of selfpropelled people. But I dont have the gold.

[Kiki]

Originally posted by Alex
<sigh> Jeez, you make it sound like we're real Facists!
MKK

Sumimasen Alex san - that was not my intention to imply such a thing nor was I trying to second guess you. I am sure everyone knows this wasn’t a simple decision - as you also pointed out.


Originally posted by James
But she wasn't lead anywhere, she was pretty much self-propelled.

Exactly my point “allowed herself”. Sometimes there is teasing and baiting going on - it's up to the other party/parties not to fall for it or take it too seriously even if it gets nasty sometimes. There are times you gotta just walk away....nuf said.

Peace

[Winter_Wolf]

Hello,
I have a muck free record because I use...
Bleach!!!!!!!!!!.......
Not intraveanously(sp?) mind you, and it tastes better when cold...
Thanks,
W.W.

[John W]

I have just come across this thread and I have to say that I am VERY disappointed!

I know Alex and Hamish and I know that they have worked damn hard to make this mag, this forum and the website work and here we all are having a petty debate on what it takes to get banned on the forums!! :angry:


C'mon people get your s*!T together! If we are all "true" kendoists then Alex and Hamish should only have to moderate this forum once a month. Not go chasing people up about some dodgy posting! I will say it once and I will say it again... In a village of three there is always one dickhead who spoils it for the other two.

My 2 cents!

[Winter_Wolf]

Hello,
John W- the only problem with them moderating as sparingly as once a month is that your not required to be a kendoka to join the forums, so we could get some rather unscrupoulus(sp?) characters who don't now kendo from their grandmothers knitting and have only joined to create flame wars. Believe me, I know I guy who does this just for kicks, but if he tries it here wait till I see him at school! Mwahahaha!
Thanks,
W.W.

[samurai999]

Originally posted by mingshi
Mr Hongsermeier,

No. You are wrong. Neither me nor the late Confound would bother participating in a forum that welcome trolling more than anything else. Notice how many people have restrained or even stopped posting in these few months of troll-epidemic already?



Not quite with you there.. You will rarely and I do emphasize RARELY find a forum devoid of threads with trolls and flames. Go to any discussion forum.. Political, Collegiate, Scientific, Car (those are REALLY bad) or even Star Trek. No Forum welcomes trolling and flaming with open arms, but ever since those IRC chat rooms in the early 90's, there have been trolls and flaming. Read and just ignore it if you don't like it.

Tim

[samurai999]

Originally posted by Kuri
Her assertations were err... interesting! Remember hiki-tsuki?!?! Too bad she couldn't (can't) view things with a wider prospective. Her loss.

Hiki... Tsuki as a real move? You can't be serious. We at the dojo tried it out one day a year ago as more of a joke than something serious. Sheesh..

Tim

[Kuri]

Originally posted by samurai999
Hiki... Tsuki as a real move? You can't be serious.

She was certainly serious about it :D Have a look at the thread.
http://www.kendo-world.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=511&highlight=hiki+tsuki

[samurai999]

Matsuda sensei put it all in a nutshell. A retreating attack? :D
Sheesh..


Tim