Topic: Question about ban messages. (Read 218 times)

It happens on all platforms.

When your account get restriction, the notification you receive does not contain details of your violations. As a user, if you want to know details, you have to open a support ticket and wait for response. I think it is the same like ban cases on the forum.

I understand that as users, we can think that adding some basic proof of violations in original ban message will reduce ban appeals from users. However, think of if further, I think people always play innocent and even you provide evidence, they will keep trying to play innocent to escape their restrictions.

It is beginning of what is called "waste of time" in moderator aspect.

Personally, I do not see how adding a link or reason to ban would be a waste of administrators time, perhaps adding an existing list such as a trust list that contains well-known reasons in addition to the option to add another reason with a link to ban would be appropriate. or at least for Hero/Legendary members

Many people will come back to make ban approval topic and admins will search for reason.

Yup, I mean the offender that gets banned, logs in and sees the ban message. Like what you mentioned, not sure if the plagiarist would see he/ she is banned for "plagiarism" or "plagiarism or spam".

That's correct. I was temp-banned once for reflink spam, although I didn't know where it came from since until some time later when I realized my thread was nuked.

Anyone can correct me if I'm wrong.

My understanding of how SMF works (note this Forum may have disabled it) is that an I.P. or indeed an I.P. range can be banned from logging into the Forum, or as is the case with banned users, they are auto banned on the basis of their I.P. be it the provider or some other marker of their origins.

If someone is banned, their profile will look the same as someone whose account is not banned on the forum. I believe that BPIP uses the modlog to account for when an account is banned, and if they show up in the modlog as being banned, they will apply an "autoban" indicator on their website.

I am not sure how bitcointalk's custom implementation of SMF 1.1.19 handles if a particular ban will show up in the modlog or not. I believe at one point, this was determined by the specific procedure a mod followed to ban an account.

Are not cases when a user is banned for plagiarism displayed as "Autobanned"?
Or am I misunderstanding something?
Usually, if an account is banned for spam, its account is not shown as Autobanned, meaning that the user himself can understand that this is a temporary ban. Isn't it?
And all other cases I see in bpip.org as an Autobanned.

For autobans, sure but manual ones should be concise. After all, it's could a single-liner like "Plagiarism" or if multiple, "Plagiarism + Malware spam". so it doesn't take an essay before banning.

Exactly and usually when members were banned because of rule breaking, they do break multiple rules.

I think the reasons are clear (and Waste of time is one of such) ^{I remember hilariousandco talked about the same reason for massive plagiarism bans in 2019} because on the platform I am working for, when moderators ban users, they simply add a kind of general ban message. Banned users will play innocent and ask what are details of my ban: which rules I broke, what trades caused my ban, etc.

In some cases, I have to file escalation support ticket. Unfortunately, at the end of support, such users break multiple rules and escalation support does not help them.

It makes sense as a platform does not break their reputation just because any arbitrary ban on a specific user.

Unless someone is a prolific spammer, or otherwise causing a lot of problems, I think it is pretty rare for the ban evasion rule to be strictly enforced. Bila0 appears to have been a forum member for quite some time, although he infrequently posts, and has earned little merit. Bila0's alt account was banned almost a year ago, so I would be somewhat surprised if he was banned for ban evasion, although being that there was a report of ban evasion just a day ago, his account may have received additional scrutiny, and if he had more than just the one account banned for independent reasons, there may be a higher chance he was banned for ban evasion.

AFAIK, mods have the ability to enter a custom ban message and absent a custom ban message, a default message will be displayed. Based on what I have seen banned users post, the custom ban message has changed over time. I am not sure if all mods have the ability to enter a custom message. I am willing to speculate that the mods do not enter any custom message when handing out the majority of bans. For example, if someone is banned for 14 days, a custom message will be used to inform the person they are banned for 14 days, but if the mod set the ban length to 20 days, there is nothing that would catch the error, and the message would still display 14 days.

Some mods use userscripts, and they could presumably be modified to allow the mods to quickly set a custom ban message when initiating a ban. Alternatively, theymos could modify the SMF implementation the forum uses to allow for mods to select a ban message from a dropdown, and/or select a number of ban reasons and/or have a temp ban automatically create a custom ban message.

If I'm correct, I have seen few request/discussion on changing the ban messages so that user can know what exactly they did but nothing happened so far. If the new forum software is coming anytime soon, that would also not make sense I think as things may not be the same as SMF in the new one. However, a specific reason would be good to avoid a lot of unnecessary threads in meta.

It would be quite a lot of work for the moderators to individually collate ban messages with the reason for it and I feel it would not have an impact as users would still create appeal threads and claim to not know the reason or when it was done.
The common reason is plagiarism or spamming which is included in the message, yet there are still tons of complaints.

The admin also posted this sometimes back;

And what Findingnemo was what caused my confusion. I though there WERE different messages for other things.
So In my mind, adding 1 more line item would not be a major programming change. If there only is one, the back end work would probably be more.

On the note of 99% of the time they know, yes probably they do.
But telling someone that they were banned for spam / plagiarism when they were banned for ban avoidance (or something else) gives the other 1% some reason to come back.


Sort of, I was under the impression that there were multiple ban messages and was wondering why there was not 1 for ban evasion.  Not knowing that there was just 1 generic message.

-Dave

I think what: @lovesmayfamilis meant, was referring to rule (25) which reads:


That if I'm not mistaken.

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The second about the first (Merit) given by: @Qunenin to: @Bila0, maybe @lovesmayfamilis, just kidding.

Because @Qunenin has been involved in selling (Merit) recently on the black market/telegram.
The accusation thread: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.58019061

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I think this is just a misunderstanding of what is said by: @lovesmayfamilis, he means maybe as I said above it leads to these two elements, that's my guess.

On the other hand I think @Atiq0, already knows he's blocked.


He shouldn't have asked again, immediately appealed the ban.

But here he asks again.


Here, anyone will be interested to tell: @Atiq0 the reason he was banned, maybe I will also answer the same thing that was done by: @lovesmayfamilis.

This is my understanding of this thread.

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I've never seen a message (Prohibition evasion), most cases (spam/plagiarism), but if it's an idea for a message, I agree, it depends on a case by case basis.

There is no separate ban message for any kind of violations as far as I know but in the past there was some talk about adding a reason column under the ban message which can be like plagiarism, excessive spamming, ban evasion, etc.

Instead of giving different messages for different violations just adding the reason for ban is very simple and more easy to add.

I'm pretty sure there's only one message you get when you get permanently banned, which is the one you quoted.  It should do the trick, since there are really only two reasons why a member would get permabanned: spamming and plagiarism.  Ban evasion is a third, but I'm not sure whether there should be a separate message for that or not, since anyone receiving the standard message when they're using an alt of a banned account should know what they did.

Why not?  It seems like I'm writing this a lot lately: Theymos just isn't adding new features/improvements to the forum lately.  As far as members asking why they got banned, I think that's a load of crap.  99% of the time they really know why, but they play the babe-in-the-woods card in their ban appeal threads more often than not.  If they didn't start off those threads pretending to wonder why in the world they got that ban message, the rest of their post wouldn't contain much of an argument for their reinstatement.

So yeah, it'd be ideal if there were different messages for each ban reason, but realistically I don't think that's going to happen.

From this post:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/--5362833

The OP gets this:


But the general consensus is that he was banned for this:



So 2 things:
1) Is there a separate ban message for ban violations?

2) If not why not? I figure it would cut down on a bunch of BS issues of people asking / complaining about their ban.

If theymos and the mods decide to ban me because I am ugly and they only want beautiful people here, that is fine, it's their house and if the rule is posted I'm good with that. But if I go to log in and it tells me I'm banned because I drive a BMW I am going to be confused as hell because I don't drive one, so I am going to open up a thread in meta and ask and argue and waste everyone's time.

-Dave