Posted by mist on April 12, 2002, at 23:00:10
In reply to I miss the people who are blocked. . . , posted by Bekka H. on April 12, 2002, at 0:02:39
Dr. Bob's intentions are good but personally I think most of the blocks here are more harmful than helpful (especially when they're prolonged—more than a week). The board loses more than it gains.
Some of the posters who've been blocked or warned in the past have annoyed me and I don't agree with some of their views, but at least they keep the boards lively and very few of them do anything destructive.
In some cases no harm has been done at all by a poster who's been blocked (for example, the posts trouble was blocked for recently aren't against anyone, she was just expressing herself and happens to be a particularly intense person).
For me the issue isn't whether or not I like someone or their posts, but about whether the particular post they're blocked for really is or isn't unsupportive.
I used to read another board where a poster once told someone who had been posting repeatedly about wanting to kill himself, that he should just do it, stop whining and being so self-centered and go ahead and die, etc. That's something to block someone for—that type of attitude and destructive hostility directed towards another poster, even in cases when the words aren't that extreme.
And as I said elsewhere, I've occasionally (fortunately not too often) read some very unsupportive, unkind, judgmental, unempathic, cold, even offensive things here that are much worse than what posters get blocked for but they don't get spotted by the civility radar because superficially, they remain within acceptable criteria.
This is not to criticize Dr. Bob but just to point out some flaws in the system in the hope that adjustments might be made to the blocking policy.
poster:mist
thread:4117
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/admin/20020308/msgs/4135.html