Banned from translatum — why a ban?

[spiros]

Banned from translatum — why a ban?

In fora it is not unusual to ban members. Some fora even mention on the profiles of the banned members the exact reasons for the ban. Most of the banned members are spammers; however, it appears that some of the most pernicious banned members (those who have transgressed the forum rules in the most severe way) appear to be fond of advertizing their ban status. It is like, having been put in jail, and telling about it every single person you meet in the street. Like bragging about your bad-boy status. Indeed, quite funny, if not absurd. Well, you know what, when you have been put in jail, it is very likely that you have done something rather unsavoury, to put it lightly.

In our case, we had to ban members who not only received substantial part of the forum income (!), but who had also been promoted to moderator and even (!) administrator status (in one particular case, translatum went as far as to organize fund-raising to buy hardware for one of these members, amongst other things!). Just imagine the severity of transgressive behaviour involved to gradually "downgrade" someone from administrator to moderator, user, cautioned user, moderated user, banned user. You may try hard, but still, you will fail. Some of those users have usernames starting with user + a number or banned + a number. For those users there is extensive documentation of their behaviour, consisting in emails, PMs and forum posts (interestingly enough, some of these users also have a very bad "citizenship" history in third sites). Of course, (most of) this material is only available for perusal to administrators and global moderators.

You might also want to check this topic.

[spiros]

We notice that some banned members (of the most pernicious kind) continue to contact our current members regarding their forum posts. They even complain about the fact that they cannot join in the dialogue. They forget that due to their past behaviour they have relinquished all rights of participation in the community. We do condemn such approaches (but of course, we are not surprised by them) and we strongly encourage users to report them (as they should report problematic posts and Personal Messages with the "Report to moderator" link). And, of course, there is nothing "private" about such inappropriate approaches which blatantly and repeatedly ignore the rules.

[spiros]

We have noticed that some users have been breaking the rules repeatedly, even after being banned. What they fail to realise, is that the severity of the measures taken are directly proportional to their actions. If after being banned they continue to misbehave there are further measures such as:

— Changing their username to a bannedX number and removing profile info.
— Changing their number of posts.
— Permanent profile deletion (this means 0 posts, so the previous item, is in effect, a favour for which they should be ever grateful).

There was one particular user who even claimed in public that translatum was his own making (it so happens that this user has even enjoyed privileges like administator status, half of the advertizing revenue for a given year, fund-raising to buy him a monitor, as well as free hospitality)! [We say in Greek: Δώσε θάρρος στο χωριάτη να σ' ανέβει στο κρεβάτι.] Sadly, there are some spiteful and envious people in the world who believe that they can misbehave ad infinitum and not suffer any consequences simply because they have a very inflated self-image and a brown-nosing entourage. I am sure that mentioning their names, releasing their eloquent communications and providing details of their activites here and elsewhere would be very much amusing to a great number of readers. It is up to them.

In some profiles you may see on the signature space a Notice about banned members. This gives you an idea of the people who continue misbehaving. The link directs to this page.