What the heck is an infraction?

D

Dooby

Regular
Cos I just got one. Just curious if it means that some random guy is gonna come and thump me.

With this infraction and my neg-rep (cheers guys) I'm thinking of starting up my own "City of Villians" clan for B3D. Anyone can join, if theres enough of us, we'll take over the forums and ransom it for ONE POUND ! MWAHAHAHA.

Seriously though, whats an infraction do?
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Good question. Mine has been looming like a disease waiting to bury me for months...
 
While Im questioning the forum:

Why am I also still a junior member. Coming up on four years with this account. And my post count (while low) is higher than other peoples who are members.

Curiouser and curiouser...
 
It's like a speeding ticket, in that it has an associated points value. Rack up too many infractions (by being villainous, etc.), and you earn a free vacation from B3D! Yay!

Seriously, it's an orderly way of recording and dealing with disorderly conduct; more serious than a warning, less than a banning. I'm sure it's further explained somewhere in the Site Feedback forum.
 
Where would I look to see if I had any infractions?

Oh and Dooby? You're probably still a junior member because of your negative reputation, you need a positive reputation to move up.
 
digitalwanderer said:
Where would I look to see if I had any infractions?
Click to expand...

You don't have 'em. ;) But generally they are on top in your User CP, right above the list of reputation received.

I know because I have a retracted rinfraction point, and although it has no influence, it stays up there permanently :D.
 
I've seen infractions used here and a few other vBB based forums. I've concluded that they are little more than an excuse for mods to be lazy. Real moderating involves determining the situation and using intelligence to figure out whether the people involved are merely overreacting, trolling, or just confused, and dealing the appropriate punishment. Each situation requires a unique and hopefully enlightened solution. Infractions however, are just generic penalty markers with no regard to situation or context. I see them in the same light as Three Strike Laws as poorly conceived laws with poorly explained justifications.
 
Deusp said:
I've seen infractions used here and a few other vBB based forums. I've concluded that they are little more than an excuse for mods to be lazy.
Click to expand...
Infraction messages can be customized when you give it out. And you can send an associated PM. It's a warning system, so I'm not really sure what you're expecting it to do. It's not *supposed* to be a punishment per-se, unless you'd configure it to auto-ban (which we are not!)
 
On the old Atari UT2K board, for a long while they had a penalty point system. You got various numbers of points from the moderators for various infractions, once you got to the limit (15 IIRC), you got banned.

All the various infractions and their points score were clearly stickied, so you knew you might get a couple of points for trolling, but you wouldn't get banned unless you made a pretty consistent and habit of it. Posting explicit porn pictures got you 15 points (and thus insta-banned).

It worked quite well, with small mistakes or errors of judgement not being totally fatal unless you were persistently idiotic, or hit one of the big banner scores by stepping well beyond the bounds of acceptable behaviour.

There was also a cool-down period where you lost a point every (IIRC) three months, so people had a chance to redeem themselves through consistent good behaviour.
 
Deusp, did you read my post? Do you honestly consider points on a driver's license for traffic infractions as imperfect as three-strike laws (keeping mind that infractions don't lead to automatic rules-generated penalties, as Arun said)? Would it be less "lazy" if mods kept track of inappropriate posts with pen and paper? That's a pretty harsh assessment of the system as it's used here, and the mods at work here.
 
The way I see it is that infractions seem the equivalent of a "warning". Nothing more, nothing less.

It isn't a tool for lazy mods, it's another tool for mods...big difference. And the more tools the merrier, from my administrative perspective. :)
 
Deusp said:
I've seen infractions used here and a few other vBB based forums. I've concluded that they are little more than an excuse for mods to be lazy. Real moderating involves determining the situation and using intelligence to figure out whether the people involved are merely overreacting, trolling, or just confused, and dealing the appropriate punishment. Each situation requires a unique and hopefully enlightened solution. Infractions however, are just generic penalty markers with no regard to situation or context. I see them in the same light as Three Strike Laws as poorly conceived laws with poorly explained justifications.
Click to expand...


This is so wrong-headed that I can only conclude it's a head-on attack on the staff masquerading as feedback on infractions.

Context is preserved, as they are tied to the post they were given on (unless a profile infraction, but not many of those are given). In other words, a mod can click from the infraction to the post/thread and read the whole thing, even if the post was deleted and is no longer visible to most users.

But the real usefullness is in providing that context history for the entire mod team. We don't have a cube farm where we all sit next to each other, talk over the walls, etc, 8-5pm every day. If one mod addresses a situation with a user, most/all of the rest of the team might know nothing about it. . . unless you have something like infractions to help in the tracking. Each infraction goes into a private staff forum, where the whole team can see it, and stays there forever. It ties the user, the infraction, the post, and the thread into one fully-contexted package that the rest of the team can review and ask questions about if they care to do so, or in reviewing future proposed corrective actions with that user.
 
Dooby said:
While Im questioning the forum:

Why am I also still a junior member. Coming up on four years with this account. And my post count (while low) is higher than other peoples who are members.

Curiouser and curiouser...
Click to expand...


4 years and you have to ask this question? Have you tried reading the FAQ and associated links it points at? That would be that link in the header bar up there that says "FAQ".
 
Geo said:
But the real usefullness is in providing that context history for the entire mod team. We don't have a cube farm where we all sit next to each other, talk over the walls, etc, 8-5pm every day. If one mod addresses a situation with a user, most/all of the rest of the team might know nothing about it. . . unless you have something like infractions to help in the tracking. Each infraction goes into a private staff forum, where the whole team can see it, and stays there forever.
Click to expand...
So when mods look up users the infractions are sort of like sticky notes on what that user has done before? SWEET!!! :D

Dang, that's the first real feature of VB that makes me want to upgrade EB to it. That feature would be damned useful for me, I use a page of quicknotes for it now. :oops:
 
digitalwanderer said:
So when mods look up users the infractions are sort of like sticky notes on what that user has done before? SWEET!!! :D
Click to expand...

Well, it's even better than that. In addition to seeing the Infractions for him on his user profile page, I can search the private forum for his user name, and it will give me all the infractions he has been given, and every post that's he's reported or post of his that was reported by someone else, since the system started. Then I can read the infraction itself and see what the mod (and which mod it was) told the user about why he was getting an infraction. Then I can click from the infraction to the actual post it was attached to (even if it was deleted --as a Regular, you know because you can see them, that most "deleted" posts are only soft deleted and temporarily invisible to most users but not the mod staff) and read that post and the rest of the thread around it to see whether I feel the infraction was justified as well. Then if I have questions, I can go back to that mod and say "Hey, I just looked through all that and I'm not sure he meant what you think there, can you fill me in some more?" or whatever.

Edit: And since it's a thread, sometimes a conversation gets going with the mods about what's going on here with this guy, the history, whatever, and that is then saved forever too if this particular user comes up again as a topic of administrative discussion.

Of course, it is only tracking the negative. Tho obviously if a given mod isn't familiar with that user at all, we can search and get a list of all his posts and surf through those to get a sense of what he's like when he's not getting infractions or his posts reported and how much value, if any, he adds to the forum by being a member.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top