an anecdote from community management

[quarrel]

Moderating a forum is hard. It's time-consuming, it requires difficult and arbitrary choices, and it's thankless. Spend any amount of time doing it and you'll quickly tire of the common responses. "I didn't break the rules." "I didn't know the rules." "The rules are stupid and wrong." And the most common one: "Other people break them worse and don't get punished."

One day while performing mod duty on a collectible card game forum, I encountered a thread asking players which out-of-print card they most enjoyed and wished to see return to print. One poster responded with a card that was discontinued on purpose because it was too disruptive of one phase of the game. Now, like any powerful card, this one was liked by a great number of players who cared more about whether they personally won than whether the game as a whole was balanced, so discontinuing it was a big and emotional issue with the player base. The proposition of returning this card to legality, even though only as a daydream, rekindled that flamewar. Faced with the facts that A) a flamewar did, in fact, erupt, B) this particular player admitted in his first post to knowing this card would not return anytime soon, so speculation on it was pointless, and C) once the flaming started, this player admitted to enjoying flamewars, I considered this a public admission of guilt. I modded his contributions to the thread and temporarily suspended him.

His response was the most unusual thing I've encountered before or since as an admin. He sent me a thoroughly calm, rational, and lucid private message letting me know I'd overstepped my authority and acted without justification. He pointed out that it did not logically follow that he intended to start a flamewar. His forum post was an honest reply to a non-inflammatory question. It was not off-topic, nor insulting, nor vulgar, nor anything else that was forbidden. It was controversial, but controversial posts were allowed. In essence, he pointed out that

He likes when X happens.
He knew X would happen if he did Y.
He did Y.
Therefore, he did Y so X would happen.

is faulty logic. (In fact, it's faulty in and of itself, never mind the fact he also had an obvious external reason for doing Y.)

And that's all he did. He didn't belabor the point. He didn't insult me. He didn't swear. He didn't tell me what I should have done or how I should feel about it or how incompetent I was or what I should do to correct my error.

I had to think all afternoon about what to do. In the end, I let the suspension stand. Regardless of bad logic on my part, I felt he acted too irresponsibly to be innocent. In general, you should not be punished for making a post that gets flamed when you weren't expecting it to, but that didn't apply here. This one fellow had stumbled into some chance plausible deniability and tried to use it as cover. At least, that was my gut feeling. I wasn't nearly as confident with it as I'd been originally, of course. I'm still not sure I did the right thing. But I'm pretty sure.

Comments

[electrickeet]

I've been faced with similar as an IRC server admin. We had one religious weirdo with a martyrdom complex who would repeatedly drag the most populated channel of the server down by dragging any conversation toward his political agenda. (Seriously, any convo you can think of. It was like an evil superpower.) I put up with his disruptions for a couple years because I felt that eventually, he'd give up and leave of his own accord. However, seeking logic in folks like that is a mistake. Finally, after seeing him participate in no way other than to turn the whole thing into a disaster of him riling up his scant supporters, I told him to behave or leave. He was plenty polite about it all, but he would do neither, so I banned him.

Four people followed him off the server and haven't returned since. Each of them had been friends of mine at one time, but seeing the philosophical directions they've taken since, I realise that I very much did the right thing in seeing where things were headed and stamping it out. Logic is all well and good, but it really can't account for the human factor, and it's actually the human factor responsible for why these folks choose to act in ways that break everything. Thus, you have to admit that logic wasn't solely what made the choice, but experience and understanding are.