People being banned randomly/without cause?

almighty_gir

Hey guys,

Just wondering if anyone else has noticed a bunch of people being banned who are usually just lurkers, and generally just good people?

tda

The only person i've ever noticed getting banned at all was Leinadien, but i feel like that was pretty warranted.

Magihat

tda said:

The only person i've ever noticed getting banned at all was Leinadien, but i feel like that was pretty warranted.

He is back as Tomtegubbe though but thankfully seems to have learned to behave himself.

AtticusMars

As I recall this is because of the extremely aggressive spam filter

edit: Looks like @sefice  is banned too

RobeOmega

AtticusMars said:

As I recall this is because of the extremely aggressive spam filter

Time to cross your fingers and hope the spam filter does not see you if that is true. I have noticed a fair amount of bans recently.

huffer

Yes, I was banned because of the spam filter (when there were dozens of spam threads mass posted), I went into our slack channel and got unbanned after talking to the admins.

EarthQuake

Yeah a few people have been banned accidentally in passes of spam cleanup. Banning normal users is something we very rarely do, so if your account gets banned please contact a mod asap. You can also email wizards@polycount.com to get in touch with the site's management.

Eric Chadwick

A recent one I saw that got auto-banned was exdtrx. This is actually Hugh, who we banned earlier this year for repeatedly posting nonsense.

Leinadien was flagged for Abuse 25 times by members, so we banned the account. We're keeping an eye on the duplicate account.

When we specifically ban an account for bad behavior, we put a note in the profile explaining why. These notes are only visible to moderators unfortunately, forum default. But if you have a question about someone's account, just ask us and we'll let you know why it happened.

If your own account is ever banned by mistake, make a new account and PM one of us (list of moderators is in the Info sticky) or email wizards@polycount.com, and we'll help you get it fixed ASAP.

PyrZern

wizards@polycount

Nice !

Eric Chadwick

gawd, ok, .com jeez.

Ruz

I was banned once for being too handsome

Bek

almighty_gir said:

Just wondering if anyone else has noticed a bunch of people being banned who are usually just lurkers, and generally just good people?

Yep. I think I was looking through some older threads and saw banned users, thought it was odd, and checked their comment history, which seemed... totally normal. Unless of course the comments/threads that got them banned were also deleted, which doesn't seem like a great idea unless it's tonnes of spam. Anyway here are two examples:

http://polycount.com/profile/comments/56680/SuperFranky
http://polycount.com/profile/comments/249487/angadsingh88

Eric Chadwick

Looks like we need to double check IP ranges. Definitely not meant to ban so many legit members.

Thanks for making this thread!

Michael Knubben

@Andreas is another one I noticed being banned recently, and not for anything obvious I could find in his history!

Eric Chadwick

I posted this in the Greentooth Slack, worth posting here as well:

Looks like Andreas was banned for being really abusive to others. (edited)

Repeatedly and vociferously.

The main reason we ban people is for the benefit of the community as a whole. If someone's being abusive, advocating warez, spamming ads, massive trolling, etc.

Not worth keeping destructive individuals around.

We don't ban for minor infractions.

I am currently digging through all the IP range bans, and narrowing down the addresses. So that should help. Doesn't seem to be un-banning accounts, but maybe the database just needs to refresh itself. I'll keep an eye on it.

Eric Chadwick

Got a nice troll email from Andreas. Wow. 

from: Andreas __
date: Sat, Nov 12, 2016 at 11:43 AM
subject: Defamation of Character.

Hello Eric;
It has been brought to my attention that you posted a defamatory comment regarding myself on the 12th of November, here. 

As the user who brought my account up mentioned, my post history does not reflect your libellous accusations. Looking through my post and thread history now for the first time in years, even I'm surprised by how much I was contributing in terms of spreading the word on tools and other points of interest to the community, and how positive I was in the vast, vast majority of my posts. I certainly never tolerated any instances of people being rude to me, but was never the instigator, so far as I can find. Not that it particularly matters, you being correct (you're not) wouldn't absolve the defamatory comment.

I've reached out to my legal counsel regarding your libellous comment and just got word back, and they recommend speaking to you privately first and attempting to resolve it with as little fuss as possible so that we can hopefully avoid suing you and the website for libel and Defamation of Character. I agree with them, and hope there's no need for me to do that.

I ask that you post an apology in that thread retracting your comments, and you'll likely need to close the thread then too. I've archived the page already (http://archive.is/o0zaY if you need a copy of the url?), and whatever the 'slack' is will need sorting too, unless it's a chatroom of course. I assume it's a chatroom so any record is gone?

Adam has done great work with the website over the years, and hopefully for many more. I would be a far less invested owner of the website, so let's not have that happen.

Many thanks,

Andreas

Probably shouldn't share this, but fucking LOL. Counsel on a Saturday? All he's done is reinforce why he was banned in the first place. 

RobeOmega

Eric Chadwick said:

"Adam has done great work with the website over the years, and hopefully for many more. I would be a far less invested owner of the website, so let's not have that happen. "

Interesting... I personally think you have done a great job with the site, especially with all of the minor tweaks and changes that have happened in the past year. Now to furiously scrub through over 4 years of posts to see if I have anything that will get be banned

Eric Chadwick

Well to be clear, that was Andreas speaking, not me. But thank you.

Don't worry, we don't dredge up old crap, otherwise we'd all be banned.  It's always some recent poor behavior that leads us to ban someone. And we always talk about it in moderator chat before taking action.

Current members shouldn't worry about it. If you're suddenly banned without an obvious reason, it's probably a mistake, we pushed a wrong button somewhere. Just ask.

Heck, I just banned myself again, earlier today. Nice job Chadwick.

Eric Chadwick

MightyPea said:

@Andreas is another one I noticed being banned recently, and not for anything obvious I could find in his history!

Digging thru our bans list to clear people, I found why Andreas was removed. It was for passive/aggressive posts like this. Also there was a general consensus among members that he was toxic. That's plenty enough for us.

AtticusMars

Wow that was an incredible thread. General Chat has really mellowed out in the last few years.

Eric Chadwick

Yeah, agreed. Love the irreverence.

Need to allow this to blossom, without encouraging the toxic.

Maybe they're symbiotic.

Hmmm.