There is an interesting article written by Steve Pavlina (some kind of motivational guy I think) after he started and then closed his own forum. Very insightful.
On bans, he said:
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2011/12...he-forums/
On bans, he said:
Quote:Quote:
The mods easily handled the routine items, but when it came to controversial bans involving one of the regulars, they had a hard time pulling the trigger. They frequently opted to keep giving warnings instead. But this response amounts to what’s called intermittent reinforcement conditioning. Effectively this rewards the negative behavior and conditions the offender to do more of the same by proving that s/he can get away with it. So things gradually got worse during this time, and some members quit the forums because of it. I don’t blame them.
When I decided to look into fixing these problems, I tightened standards and reminded mods that we shouldn’t be giving members half a dozen warnings. The rules are simple and not at all difficult to follow. But when the next incident came up which seemed pretty clear cut, they still hesitated. I could see the mods were agreed on the right call, but it was hard for anyone to step up and take responsibility for it. So I sped things along because it would have been worse not to act quickly. Then I had to deal with the banned guy emailing me to complain and then trash-talking me elsewhere. Truth is he’d been behaving like a jerk for a long time and should have been banned much sooner. Some forum members expressed great appreciation that he was finally kicked out.
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2011/12...he-forums/