Warnings And Bans

Ugh, I don't even know why you would jump to that conclusion.
If RoyBoyCF DID mean LBS, then I have no idea how he saw him, but he was far from highly respected. Most of his posts were one word and pointless and he made stupid threads.

Anyway, I still believe that something in the site rules should mention Goodbye Threads. Whether it's a ban or not.

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His rating went from 100 or -100. Make what you will of that.

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omg guys I was gonna make a goodbye thread cuz I was gonna leave but you guy hate that and now im leaving cuz you guys are TOBAIS.

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66.253.187.94 banned, I've heard of hammering sites, but to the point 50% of the last 10,000 HTTP requests that go to that IP?

No wonder all the stupid 503 errors are popping up.

I'm not sure whether this might belong better under the User Ratings thread, but no one seems to be using that for discussion, so I might as well say it here. Please understand that I am just reporting my observations; I have never misbehaved, nor am I associated with anyone who has.

It seems to me that setting a hard rating threshold of -100 for banning might be a little mathematically unsound, given that the reputation power system tends to cause the overall magnitude of most users' ratings to increase over time. Although it is only a slight risk, a user could theoretically accumulate a lot of negative ratings and then get banned after doing nothing for a while, before (s)he has had a chance to reform and/or dispute malicious ratings. (BTW: What is the formal procedure, if any, for disputing ratings given in bad faith?)
For future consideration, might we be able to have ratings decay with inactivity? I'm not sure whether I've made this suggestion too late for 5th style.

Also, I've noticed that certain users from the Philippines tend to get unfairly low ratings for brief periods of time, possibly due to language barrier issues (other people either not understanding their English or misinterpreting non-English posts as nonsense). This probably applies to other nationalities, and I admittedly haven't read the forums thoroughly enough to see whether such ratings really are unfair. How should we deal with this?

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Regarding this, I think the burden falls on these users to tell the others that they aren't very experienced with English. Simply a little note in a signature saying "Please forgive my English, I'm still learning" or something similar tends to change the kind of responses these users get. Many people don't look at the locations of users, and many of these users don't even reveal their location, so many users simply assume that those users are coming from English speaking countries. Negative ratings shouldn't be given to users because of the language barrier because most of these posters are able to convey whatever they're trying to say. However, if they don't make it clear that they struggle with the language, then it's going to be harder for others to assume that they do.

And of course, people should not be giving negative ratings to people for using their native languages in the proper forums.

I remember a Japanese user who used to post (don't think he does anymore) who had pretty poor English as I recall. He had a little note in his siggy that noted his inexperience with English, and I don't think anyone ever complained about it.

-100 is actually pretty low. My rating is 144.1, so if I change someone's rating from 0 to -5, that subtracts 9 points. If everyone had the same power as me, it would take 12 people's -5s to ban someone (after you deduct the number of positive raters from the total of negative raters). In reality, there are more people with lower ratings than there are people with higher ratings. If you're contributing to discussions and not just haphazardly posting spam, it's hard to piss off 15 or more people.

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Good times.

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When I go to lower someone's rating, if it's already negative, I won't lower it unless I actually think they should be banned. There are probably other people who take this into account too. This is especially true for people who bump old threads and start off with a negative rating because of it. If it's too low and that's all they've done, I might even give them a +5 to forestall them getting banned. RoyBoyCF is right, a poster has to make all of the higher rated posters decide to ban them. Sure, it's a sort of mob rule, but none of the high rated posters show a tendency to go on power trips and band together to ban people, so it doesn't matter. DDR and ZIV are what we care about, and if those aren't interfered with, we're pretty lenient.

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I saw that Game and Watch junk thread last night, and that kid has some problems. PRE CHEERS FOR AL LOCKING THE THREAD AND CATCHING HIM CREATING DUPLICATE ACCOUNTS. Hip Hip

Hey, there's another -100.
Although I think he's been below -100 for quite a while now.
http://zenius-i-vanisher.com/v4/viewuser.php?userid=3085

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Yeah, I think it was covered in the thread a couple of weeks ago, and he's just inadvertedly started a discussion that's increased this thread's size considerably, though he's not actually been banned...

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He is now.

Can't help but notice that I'm still getting plenty of 503's. Are multiple ip's doing this?

It's happening to me also

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90.35.179.182 banned cos of HTTP requests. People really need to stop hammering the simfiles with download accelerators and whatnot...

Looks like that helped. Thanks

It was someone from France...

[cheeto]$ host 90.35.179.182
Name: ALagny-155-1-60-182.w90-35.abo.wanadoo.fr
Address: 90.35.179.182

.anaujiram ekoms ot nuf st'I

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.... ok.....

well, here's another one: http://zenius-i-vanisher.com/v5/viewuser.php?userid=3303

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