Should gimmethickerhoops be banned

I only partly quoted the posts to highlight the behaviour aimed at him. What seems to get forgotten here, is we are all volunteers not paid to respond to every scrutiny of a decision as you or other members may wish to pull to bits. The rules are applied for simplicity, might not be fair but that's life, democracy is to time consuming.

Quite simply if he had followed the rules of his community there would not have been a problem. The request went on the mod board and it was implemented.

 

I think if gth is actually reading all of this (which I presume he can still do) then he will be having a field day soaking up all the attention he is receiving. To Leo - He's not worth us falling out over. To brb - it's not a bad thing to have to justify our actions, particularly if in a position of any authority. Banning is not something which should be done lightly and is only justifiable if personal insults, repeated racist content or consistent foul language are involved. I have been on the QPR board on quite a few occasions and know them to be a good bunch of lads (& lassies) and so would trust by their judgement on this. On the other hand rules should be challenged regularly if they are to have any legitimacy. A strong critique of the existing rules being that, as they stand, a person can be as insulting as they wish on other clubs boards on a regular basis - and risk only local bans (ie confined to those boards).

 

Cologne - I completely agree and have no intention of falling out with any hornets over this. I doubt GTH can read this if his access has been blocked and do not think he revels in us giving him attention. He has his own strange sense of humour which some people do not like. This is no longer about GTH though

However I do object to non Hornets telling us who we can and cannot have on our board. The more brb posts the more I see him as a "we're in charge, we work hard for nothing and you will do what we tell you " type of person. To imply that if we took Busy Bee back we would somehow be undermining the authority of the whole site is laughable and insulting.

Before he stuck his oar in - Minxy had proposed a solution which we may have been able - as hornets - to come to a decision on. I may add that our own Moderator Hornette- and for what it is worth myself as an ex Moderator - and I have a PM from BHD suggesting he too did not like the idea of banning people unless it was unavoidable. Now though we are being told we have to not make our own decision but to kow tow to brb. I don't like it but have to accept it.

Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely they say.

I am sure the world would have fallen apart if Busy Bee had been allowed in to our site.

 

Bit unfair on brb imo. He and Minxy do an impossible job well. I've been friends with Gimme but he wwas warned so only has himself to blame.

 

I would like to clarify the supermods position on this

If the Hornet fans wish to adopt Busy Bee, you can have him posting on here.

We would expect you to warn/ban him if he breaks any of the site rules ..... as we would with any other poster

Neither brb nor I use your forum, as we understand how unpopular we are with some posters, so it would be up to your fans/mods to regulate

Can I just say we do tried to do our best to be fair and I am therefore rather disappointed in the tone of Leo's last post with regard to brb, as in my opinion he does a near impossible job well.

Please find some way of deciding if you want BB or not & then let me know

 

I merely expressed an opinion on the topic. As any mod can check on the mod board, did i request Gimme's ban, NO - Did i ban Gimme, NO. Did i ban Busy Bee, NO. But because i have expressed an opinion opposite to yours, you now turn this on me and insult me, seemingly to me as though to sway opinion among your fellow board members. Have i mentioned your name and insulted you at any point, NO. You state quote; 'I do object to non Hornets telling us who we can and cannot have on our board.' - But i am not the only non Hornet to express an opinion on here. So you want freedom of opinion as long has people agree with you ie i keep my oar out. So be it i'll keep my oar out.

 

I agree that because there are a set of rules, they should be looked at from time to time to see if they are in need of changing or even fine tuning. Being a Mod is not something I would want to do and I am grateful to those who do take it on. I rather doubt that any of them do it because they like power, they are not politicians after all. It is clearer now that gth can only really blame himself for the ban having been warned, although when on this board he has been a pebble in the boot, rather than a huge rock to crush us. I don't like people being censored until they step over the line, but maybe I would draw my line in a different place to others.

A football team here won promotion to the 2nd division but have been banned from taking their place because they broke financial rules. Unfair, they shout. Some others give them support, others say that they knew what they were doing. There will always be two sides to every situation when rules are concerned. Work from the inside if you want them changed. It might mean putting forward a reasoned case as to why they should be altered, but to be critical, I didn't know until today that these rules existed.

 

ofh...a reasoned response without the insults, so hopefully you will allow me to clarify your latter point. When i was installed as supermod by the site owner, i felt the previous supermod (just an opinion not stating it as fact) had been put under considerable strain. I looked at the situation and found that when a member was banned from his own team board they would then go and disrupt another board. ie ban an Arsenal fan from the Arsenal board, it would then go disrupt the Spurs and Chelsea boards etc. So i needed to find a way to cut the workload. Because you would end up with multiple banning requests. So if it was a ban from an opposing team board, that in itself did not create a problem, but if it was a ban from own team board it would. Hence the rules that i quoted earlier in this thread. Those rules have always been transparent on the mod board and worked effectively up until now.

It was stated earlier that a banned member may not be able to read the board, that is untrue. It is the account that is banned not the ip, hence how gimme was able to create another account. Also he would and still can read in guest mode.

Due to this it happens quite often that banned members can come back and cause more disruption. I know and accept that some may consider Busy Bee to be an exception to the rules. But normally 99.9% of the time, i get asked to deal with the user, that has created another account. Eventually the only way might be to implement an ip ban, but once i do that i cannot remove it. So i avoid it at all costs and just continue to ban the accounts instead, until they get bored, but generally at the requests of mods. I have at no point considered banning gimme's ip to make it clear, nor would i, as i expected him to be allowed back sometime in the future, but he chose to create another account in the meantime instead as a Watford fan. But imagine this, that Luton supporters started to create Watford accounts and i didn't deal with it, your board would be in meltdown in no time. Gimme broke the rules, yeah no big deal accept all the work it creates everyone, because he feels he can constantly flout any basic community rules.

If we make an exception for Busy Bee, not saying we wouldn't. We have to think about consideration exceptions for everyone else. That's a lot more complex than it seems. you only have to look at this one thread for just one banned member to see the work involved to take on board everyone's view.

Yes, we could argue why are mods not allowed to carry out their own bans, well that's a simple one as experienced on the Liverpool board and Hash, when accounts started disappearing! He's not the only one to of done it and for sure he won't be the last when people find ways around the control panel. And when i say disappear, i mean totally disappear to never ever be able to be reinstated, posts, threads the lot. Hence why restrictions have to be in place to protect the site as well has protecting the user.

TBH i don't care either way whether Busy Bee is allowed back on, it really does not trouble me, I am merely being consistent in opinion. If the mods want the rules changed so that there is not a site ban when they get an own team board ban then fine, we can change the rules, but i would suggest they really think through the consequences of that before forwarding the suggestion as per protocol for the site on the mod board.

Hope that makes things slightly clearer, all the above scenarios are hypothetical for ease of explaining and none of it was aimed personally at you ofh.

Cheers brb.

 

I think that you have shown up the problem that I mentioned about not knowing these rules existed. You say "Those rules have always been transparent on the mod board ......" , but the usual posters did not know about them. A great deal of this debate has come about because we did not know.

 

Fair comment but the last time we tried to be transparent and open for example when people were banned from boards, it caused a lot of trouble, people saying they did not want to know this stuff, get it off our board. I know it all seems simple OFH, but we are damned if we do and we are damned if we don't. However, there was nothing stopping your mods from ever publishing the rules on your board. I have seen some mods do this in the past for other boards, maybe your mods honestly felt no need too until now for a non Watford supporter. Trouble is all the communities have their own different individual way of implementing their own rules and we would never be able to keep track if we went board by board on how they apply their rules. Also i don't really want to be in a situation where a rule is shown and then it is decided well, we can do this for Watford but not Southampton, it would become an absolute logistical nightmare for us. Coming back to my word earlier today, simplicity. Just look at the amount of time i've spent discussing this. I can't honestly believe many people would go to the trouble i have, and i'm damn certain the site owner wouldn't, in the politest sense.

Any way all said and done, Minxy asked yesterday i think it was if the Watford board wanted Busy Bee reinstated, and i'm not even sure if she has even had an answer yet. Which is amazing considering all the debate.

 

Not really . as has already been discussed further back in the thread the decision will be taken when some of those Watford posters who were originally for the ban have stated their opinions. No decision will be taken till then as we always want to show respect to the feelings of our posters and take those feelings into account. When we know how the majority feel, we will let minx know.

 

they obviously don't know you minxy

have I mentioned sending him to Barnsley

send all banned posters there
sure they can find something to do till they have been rehabilitated

 

You running some sort of NOT606 Boot camp Kiwi.

 

life has obviously been too easy for em lamba
6 months on the Barnsley board with no outside visits should knock some respect for others into them

 

I'm sure Minxy could find loads of candidates.

 

might need some help then
what are you upto
bring your own truncheon

 

I have got rather fed up with this thread, something you will not find me saying very often, and the sooner it can be finished and locked off the better in my opinion. It has come down to a discussion about the principles of free speech as far as I can see, and how far people should be allowed to go before they are reigned in. As usual with the Watford forum we are good at putting forward our views without resorting to name calling as you might see elsewhere, yet the whole topic kicked off when one member of Not606 tried to find a way back into the site after his own mods asked for a ban because of unacceptable views. When our disgraced poster came back under the false guise of being a WFC fan his comments were not controversial in any way that I can see. Maybe he was trying to keep a low profile and not draw attention to himself, I don't know, but he didn't cause offence to anyone. If as Dave says there is no malice in the guy, then he must be stupid to keep putting out comments that he suspects will bring about a ban.

In order to close this topic off, I will make a suggestion, that if you don't like it will not offend me in the slightest. Let us allow him to use the WFC board for a period of three months as a probationary period and see if he can fit in with the general manner that we conduct ourselves. Create a disturbance and the probation finishes. Over the three months he will maybe think more about what he is saying and the effect it will have on others. Would he want to join with us on those terms? I don't know, but that would be for him to decide.

 

I would be in favour of such a probation period Frenchie. Many thanks to brb for taking the trouble to come on here and explain the case. Many of us didn't know the rules before this debate started and so a lot of time was lost. As I see it a ban from your own club's board applies throughout the whole site - whereas a ban from another board applies only to that board. Whether this is logical is open to debate - however it emphasizes how important it is for the individual boards to have a transparent way of dealing with this. It is not enough for a couple of posters to pm their mods asking for a ban on someone - and, having browsed through the QPR board, I have failed to find any debate on there regarding gth. I hope that we would handle things differently.
We have to find a solution. Do we want to be the only board which he is allowed onto ? Simply finding a majority decision here is not enough because many of those in favour of his reinstatement are either lukewarm or have nothing against it - whereas those against are more definite in their opinion. I want to get this behind us relatively quickly in such a way which does not lead to bad feelings in any corner.

 

That's the most important thing in my opinion Cologne - also, thank you to OFH for his suggestion.

I must say I'm not happy with the way this has panned out. He's banned and I don't see why we should let a QPR fan with a clear agenda against our club post on here when he can't post on his own board - nobody's fully explained why he should be a special case. It doesn't sit right with me at all. However, as I said already, I do believe in second chances for all and I'm not about to go against that principle tempting as it is.

I'm out of this thread now - but having made my position a bit clearer won't object to whatever is decided.

 

1. The reason I made the offer was because H was fairly adamant the Gimme had been unfairly treated by the site. I don't happen to agree with her but given my history with both H & Gimme I made an alternative offer which I felt might be acceptable to her. In hindsight it would have probably been better if I had just taken the flack as usual & not made the offer. However it has been made & I will stand by it this once. Apologises to brb for having to stand by me when I hadn't thought though the consequences this may have.

2. Gimme was a 2nd chance ...... this will be his 3rd