Should permanent banning be a moderator role?

[Yugensoft]

Based on your opinion, experience, or any other insight, as a person involved in the internet's forum space, is permanent banning something that should be in the realm of moderation (yes) or administration (no).

This poll is placed for settling the questions recently raised again in https://xenforo.com/community/threads/more-moderator-administrator-tools.79468/page-7#post-1164103

 

[Alpha1]

An administrators role does not include moderating users or content. An administrators role is in essence administrative. Hence permabanning is a moderating action.

 

[Gregory Lynn]

My personal opinion is the forum is the admins baby, if anyone should decide on who's getting banned it should be the admin. But I don't see anything wrong with the mods suspending people.

 

[ŽivaAkcija]

My personal opinion is the forum is the admins baby, if anyone should decide on who's getting banned it should be the admin. But I don't see anything wrong with the mods suspending people.

i agree, banning people is only for admins, but maybe add option for moderators to ban people 24 hours or 7 days, after that admin decide about permanent ban.

 

[Yugensoft]

My personal opinion is the forum is the admins baby, if anyone should decide on who's getting banned it should be the admin.

And by extension, appointing others to ban for him (which is what mods spend half of their time doing on large energetic forums) must also be his decision. He creates mods precisely because he doesn't want to do all that work on his forum himself.

I suppose the real best way to settle this would be to invite only admins of forums to vote on the question of "should you have the right to assign banning power to a mod?", but I suppose the outcome of that vote would be a foregone conclusion.

 

[Gregory Lynn]

And by extension, appointing others to ban for him (which is what mods spend half of their time doing on large energetic forums) must also be his decision. He creates mods precisely because he doesn't want to do all that work on his forum himself.

I suppose the real best way to settle this would be to invite only admins of forums to vote on the question of "should you have the right to assign banning power to a mod?", but I suppose the outcome of that vote would be a foregone conclusion.

I have seen way too many forums where someone gets appointed moderator and they think they are a god and they go on a banning spree. And ban people for no reason just because they can. I don't want any part of that on my forum. (that is if it ever takes off)

 

[keithgh]

As a Moderator I am often banning Spammos (usually sex related) as far as members only two over many years.

Keith

 

[ŽivaAkcija]

I have seen way too many forums where someone gets appointed moderator and they think they are a god and they go on a banning spree.

That is true, some people not live life, some people are realy frustrated about everything, in my country there is only one so called forum and full of moderators who dont know anything about moderation, they dont live life in real time.

 

[keithgh]

I was a member of a Forum and a very knowledgeable topic 16yld Mod would ban a member for usually several hrs simply because he thought it was funny. It was the result of several good members leaving the forum. He kept the job and the good members never came back. The Forum is now practically dead in the water.

Keith

 

[Martok]

Moderators can ban members (either temporarily or permanently) from the front end (ie without any access to the ACP). This is done with warnings and warning actions. I described an example of how I do this on my site here:

https://xenforo.com/community/threads/addon-to-ban-users.111292/#post-1029101

 

[whynot]

He kept the job and the good members never came back.

The admin wasn't better than his forum's moderator.

 

[Mike]

This is generally a moot point as we have added direct ban support for moderators in XF2 via a moderator permission.

That said, using warnings to trigger bans based on bad behavior is a good idea as it creates an audit trail.

 

[TPerry]

Using Warnings is the BEST way of doing it. Very easily audited as Mike pointed out and it's simple to set up. No real need if the warnings are configured properly to have a direct "Ban" button - simply assign enough points to trigger the ban and then give that user that needs to be banned that warning that triggers it.

 

[Yugensoft]

Using Warnings is the BEST way of doing it. Very easily audited as Mike pointed out and it's simple to set up. No real need if the warnings are configured properly to have a direct "Ban" button - simply assign enough points to trigger the ban and then give that user that needs to be banned that warning that triggers it.

On some larger and less sedate boards, perma-banning is daily routine. There's no warning process for when a nut shows up or a previously banned member re-registers just to rage. It's just click, gone, to keep things under control instead of degenerating into 4chan or a YouTube comments section. And if that's not enough you assign more mods in more time zones. "Simply assign enough points to trigger a ban" isn't so simple compared to "click permaban".

MyBB actually took it a step further with a "Purge Spammer" button. When some drone comes by to copy paste his Cialis sales letter across every board on your forum, you just hit the "Purge Spammer" button and he not only gets banned, but all his threads and posts get deleted too.

 

[Alpha1]

MyBB actually took it a step further with a "Purge Spammer" button. When some drone comes by to copy paste his Cialis sales letter across every board on your forum, you just hit the "Purge Spammer" button and he not only gets banned, but all his threads and posts get deleted too.

This is what the xenforo spam cleaner does. It cleans up all other content as well.

 

[Chris D]

If I may say, it does appear you might have made some assumptions about how XenForo works and in the process missed that some of the features are already there, or there are approaches we've taken (such as permissions) which do actually make sense in most contexts and were a conscious design decision. Granted, you can't one click permanent ban a normal user (until XF2) and we would recommend the warning system for that for the time being, but you can one click permanent ban a spammer and clean up all of their content using the "Spam" button.

While you wait for XF2 you could consider creating a permanent ban warning action (that kicks in after X points) and a permanent ban warning (of X points) so that moderators permanent banning a user is still possible, still audited and still relatively few clicks.

I'm not sure how these assumptions have happened but please do let us know if we can add any further clarity to anything or if you have any questions about anything else which might seem missing or function differently to what you're used to.

 

[Yugensoft]

Well the explanations I've gotten after raising this point have cleared up my assumptions. I guess I expected how use the admin side to jump out as obviously as the user side did, perhaps I was being too brash.

 

[Haydric]

I am conflicted when it comes to this question. I feel if you're a moderator, you should have the ability to ban accounts, but then again that should be something only administrators should do. On my board I use the moderator essential addon, and do allow mods to perma ban users. But as a team we talk and discuss this before any action is taken.

 

[Paul B]

But as a team we talk and discuss this before any action is taken.

Winner!

 

[Chris D]

XF2 adds a moderator permission so you can allow your moderators to ban users on the front end:



It looks something like this:



You may decide to give that permission to only certain senior moderators, or even still restrict it to admins, but at least it means admins can ban on the front end now, instead of having to log in to the Admin CP.