Forum:Purpose of Ban Forums

So with the passing of a couple rules in Forum:New Editing Policies today, I've been thinking about Ban forums themselves. We just passed a rule allowing admins to give bans to users when our rules are clearly broken. And while talking about the rule we also passed about not letting inactive users vote on ban forums, and while talking about that I thought "wait, if admins ban people for rule violations, then what are ban forums actually for?"

So I thought long and hard today about all the ban forums I've seen here. Just about all of them had one common point brought up: the subject was always accused of disturbing the wiki and making it harder to edit/get things done. Forum:Klobis, Forum:Genocyber, Forum:SeaTerror, and Forum:Galaxy9000, they all have that.

So, now that Admins can administer bans for clear violations of rules, I think forums should be for administering more subjective things, like user behavior. And because of the subjectivity of such a ban, that's why I think having the active editing community take part in the discussion and the decision would be best. That way it's not just the admins going "we're banning you because we don't like you!"

Overall, it could be a more forgiving process where we might not have to worry about people breaking rules exactly to the letter, and helping to close up some of the obvious loopholes in our rules that can be taken advantage of (such as Galaxy escaping any discipline for his actions by making a new account, etc).

All of this in addition to the only reason that (I think) still survive as reasons for ban forums: User-made accusations of rule breaking or disputes. Though I'm not even sure those are even necessary now...

I definitely would not want forums like this to lead to permanent bans, unless the user continued to cause problems. We've never had that problem before, but I just wanted to clarify.

Anyways, I think we need to have a talk about how we can work to smooth over behavior here, and how we can work to keep users with bad attitudes away from here. 05:15, February 8, 2015 (UTC)

Discussion
I thought this was obvious. As you said, forums still serve a purpose in cases where the rules aren't technically broken, but the user's behaviour is poisonous to the wiki. 13:27, February 8, 2015 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm kind of surprised we used ban forums for anything else. But I guess the users here just hate the idea of an admin making a decision. 13:37, February 8, 2015 (UTC)

Well, now that we have a rule requiring veteran editors to be treated the same as newbies, it's quite likely that ban forums will actually be used for users' actions which is up for debate on whether they are harmful or not. Personally, I don't think this deserves a discussion, other than clarifying that ban forums would only be for users' actions that are up for debate. 01:32, February 9, 2015 (UTC)

So basically we're discussing if users can still raise the question of whether someone should be banned or not if the admins haven't taken action?

17:30, February 10, 2015 (UTC)

Ban forums sometimes felt more like a trial, which wasn't a bad thing, except only certain users get the privilege of having a trial. These being users who have been here so frequently. It's a bit unfair to ban a new user for making the same action as a veteran while the veteran simply gets a ban forum. Often at times, ban forums exist just as an excuse to take shots and have arguments with other users. Ban forums should really only be made for users with debatable actions (being actions that aren't favorable but don't TECHNICALLY break any rules) or for users to request a ban publicly. But also, if an admin bans a user, they have every right to. It's part of their job. I don't think anybody wants to see someone banned indefinitely out of nowhere, but I think our admins understand the responsibilities and actions enough to know when is or isn't a right ban. So basically, admins, do whatever you feel like. For users who might get ban forums, just behave yourselves and maybe your ban won't end up getting longer. Then hopefully you won't need to vow revenge and come back occasionally to vandalize everything, ultimately showing how much time you've actually wasted when you legitimately contributed. 04:25, February 11, 2015 (UTC)