RDS permanent ban

[axn]

Originally Posted by Prime95

RDS was offered his own blog area with full moderator privileges within. There was no interest.

I think that is the end of the discussion, then. No point in

[Dubslow]

Originally Posted by ixfd64

How about a compromise: unban him but make it so that his posts must be approved by a moderator?

Although this has already been addressed, I would append that this had been proposed for several other users prior to RDS crossing the line (forcefully, and more egregiously, repeatedly). Either way, as P95 said, the trial of this method led to nothing but the predicted outcome, which was untenable.

[jasonp]

Originally Posted by Stargate38

IIn my opinion, those are MUCH worse offenses than what he did, and he didn't do any of those 4. So PLEASE UNBAN HIM! And please tell me how to gain access to the Hasselhoff forum without having to donate RS₃₆ dollars. If you don't, I'm seriously considering reserving every unreserved sequence <140 digits, and running them until they hit 140 digits (or terminate/merge), so that Yafu@Home doesn't have any more sequences to run after they finish their current queue. You don't want that, do you? I'm really upset at the moment because of this (IMHO) unexpected ban!

RDS would not come back even if his ban was lifted.

There are places where throwing a tantrum will get you what you want; mersenneforum is not one of those places.

[retina]

I think anyone that makes threats should be insta-banned. That is a worse transgression than any swearing or condescending rants IMO.

[xilman]

Originally Posted by retina

I think anyone that makes threats should be insta-banned. That is a worse transgression than any swearing or condescending rants IMO.

Sounds like a threat to me: behave or get banned.

[Antonio]

Originally Posted by jasonp

RDS would not come back even if his ban was lifted.

There are places where throwing a tantrum will get you what you want; mersenneforum is not one of those places.

I'm pretty sure I still see his name appearing on the currently active users list from time to time.

[science_man_88]

Originally Posted by Antonio

I'm pretty sure I still see his name appearing on the currently active users list from time to time.

his last activity was yesterday around 11:30 when I go to his user page.

[GP2]

Originally Posted by Prime95

As to a poll and/or unban, what's the point? History will repeat itself. RDS would be a useful contributor for somewhere between a week and a several months. Then he'd go off the rails and be banned again.

RDS was offered his own blog area with full moderator privileges within. There was no interest.

Even if the final outcome is predictable, from a cost-benefit point of view, a few useful contributions from a knowledgeable contributor would outweigh any minor emotional upset and the trivial effort of clicking a mouse to re-ban him if necessary. Even then, any new ban should have an expiry date.

If he does continue to read these forums, it's undoubtedly because he has an abiding interest in some of the news posted here and not necessarily because he might wish to participate again. But why not just unban him and see what happens? What's the worst that could happen? Nothing that hasn't been seen or coped with before.

[rogue]

Originally Posted by GP2

Even if the final outcome is predictable, from a cost-benefit point of view, a few useful contributions from a knowledgeable contributor would outweigh any minor emotional upset and the trivial effort of clicking a mouse to re-ban him if necessary. Even then, any new ban should have an expiry date.

If he does continue to read these forums, it's undoubtedly because he has an abiding interest in some of the news posted here and not necessarily because he might wish to participate again. But why not just unban him and see what happens? What's the worst that could happen? Nothing that hasn't been seen or coped with before.

What "useful" contributions are you thinking of? We have plenty of others on this forum that provide useful and constructive contributions without the hate speech. I personally cannot think of one question that has gone unanswered in his absence the he alone could have answered.

[jnml]

Originally Posted by rogue

What "useful" contributions are you thinking of? We have plenty of others on this forum that provide useful and constructive contributions without the hate speech. I personally cannot think of one question that has gone unanswered in his absence the he alone could have answered.

A strictly personal opinion: Would, hypothetically, RDS react to some of my post with something like "you're a fucking idiot", I'd not consider it a hate speech. I'd consider it a valuable piece of information about me being wrong from a reliable source. Therefore I'd probably thank and try to get a link to some material I can learn from.

Why should I care for a single millisecond about a couple of bad words from a person I have never seen? And you know what? I guess, if I'd actually ever meet RDS, it'll be probably a rather nicely spent time.

Just sharing thoughts, I do not propose anything whatsoever.

[Mysticial]

I'm amazed by the amount of tolerance there is here.

As a longtime user coming from Stackoverflow where I've become quite familiar with the moderation process there. They will hand out lengthy bans (sometimes upwards of 20 years - permaban) even for users that have hundreds or thousands of positive contributions because the negatives of keeping them around (moderator time and driving away other users) outweighs the contributions of the user.

Based on the example posts from that user I've seen from this thread, such a user would probably (and promptly) get served with successive suspensions of exponentially increasing duration until Stackoverflow employees decide to manually freeze the account for 20+ years and put the IP address on an internal watch list in case the user comes back with another account.

But on the other hand, we're talking Stackoverflow here. There are literally millions of users there and only a few dozen moderators. So it's scalability issue.