Thread for admin action transparency and feedback.
Warning for @doubtingthomas. He is very near being banned. He has repeatedly pressured me for attention in PMs and has pushed and violated my boundaries. I told him again that I didn’t want to PM with him, and then I didn’t respond when he PMed again anyway … so he escalated to sending me multiple emails. He has used a variety of escalation tactics to try to pressure and emotionally manipulate me to get free, private attention.
Also, his forum posts have had negative value and he has never actually tried to learn (or critique) CF.
Public CF forum posts are the only place I’m available for free discussion. (Feedback/comments may be sent by forum PM or email with no expectation of discussion.)
Don’t violate people’s boundaries and consent.
Warning for @AnneB. She’s misbehaved, and then escalated, to try to get my attention. Two of the more recent examples:
-
I explained problems with the Friendly category, moved it to a sub-category, and made the Projects category to try to solve those problems. Anne then undermined me by starting a new “Project” in Friendly, not in Projects. She avoided using the template I wrote to structure projects better and help prevent bad projects. Further, because of her ongoing attempts to get attention from me, I don’t want to police her and give her attention as a reward for doing something wrong, so I was unable to correct it.
-
Anne implied that social putdowns are welcome on the forum in general:
I see Friendly as a place where there’s some attention to not putting people down socially.
That’s a passive-aggressive social putdown against me and my forum.
Her posts have been bad but the main problem is causing trouble and then escalating to try to get (negative) attention from me. People need to do a reasonable job of writing posts that I can just not reply to, which don’t pressure me or do harm if ignored.
@JustinCEO is under consideration to be banned because of fraternizing with the people harassing me. He may have left the forum. If he comes back, he may only reply to Gaslighting discussion (split from: Justin’s Miscellaneous Posts) - #105 by Elliot
If Justin responds to the problem, I’ll then make a decision about whether to ban him.
Sorry for that. I will not do that again.
When you said that you don’t want me to PM you did you also mean that I cannot even discuss with you about hiring you for philosophy consulting? After you sent me the request to not PM you I made sure that I didn’t bring in any private stuff from past and only talked to you as a prospective client. Only stuff that I brought in from past was relevant information I had already provided that a prospective client needs to provide. I only sent you the email to inquire if I could hire you for philosophy consulting which I was ready to pay for (if I could afford it). I didn’t want to hire you for free. After that I sent an email (which was pressuring) to please not reject me as a client or reject my request of referring me to other philosophy consultants you mentioned in you philosophy consulting article whom I am ready to pay as well.
I do intend to put in a sincere effort to learn CF. Sorry for contributing negatively to CF.
I will not do it again.
Please don’t ban me. I won’t send you private messages anymore. To the best of my understanding, I will try to make sure that I don’t pressure you to give me private attention and I will not push and violate your boundaries.
I will work on doing better at this before posting again.
I didn’t fully mean this. That’s because I was emotional and mostly focused on trying to not get banned. I somewhat understand what you mean here. You’ve said multiple times that you want to build a sanctuary for the best minds. Somethings I can think of that is of negative value are:
- asking for help mostly by asking how to proceed and then not following up on it. If someone new reads that post they will think that that advice was not useful instead of thinking that I’m actually bad at doing projects
- trying to participate in other people’s discussions to get them to focus on some interest of mine to show that I belong and/or make myself feel that I positively contributed
- I feel this was also a negative post as well but I can’t explain why.
Earlier I thought to myself that I have paid the membership fees for the forum and I am not doing bad stuff of the type that got people banned in discord so I thought this cannot be one of the reasons you were considering for banning me but now I see that there’s no point in tolerating negatively impacting person from whom you don’t see any signs of possible change and start of positive progress. It ultimately harms your goal of building the sanctuary.
I went through the posts I have made in this forum, starting in May 2021. I saw myself behaving badly in many of those posts. The bad behavior included: dishonesty, indirect criticism and attacks, admitting to wrongdoing but not apologizing and not changing, holding other people to higher behavior standards than I hold myself to, and posting for the purpose of showing off rather than learning or helping. I apologize for that bad behavior.
@S_Emiya received a second warning. I said he’d get a temporary ban next time.
@doubtingthomas was restricted to one topic: Doubtingthomas Topic
After prior warnings, @S_Emiya was banned for 3 days for violating quoting rules. Learning Paths Forward Project - #9 by Elliot
@doubtingthomas was banned for 7 days for a misquoting-adjacent post. He was warned previously. He also got stricter restrictions on his posting due to various problematic actions.
Doubtingthomas Philosophy Topic - #27 by Elliot
New rule: @doubtingthomas (DT) is only allowed to post things related to philosophy in this thread, and only allowed to write posts that he thinks contribute positively to the forum. Other topics, like politics, are not allowed and will result in being banned. Also, DT is not allowed to tag anyone using @name. The main point of leaving DT unbanned was just in case he ever had something important to say, and leaving open Paths Forward, but he hasn’t tried to post important or philosophical things since then, and instead has written bad posts on other topics, often with design features to bait attention. For example:
Recklessly attributing ideas to people with no source or quote is not OK. That breaks the forum rules . It’s especially bad to do it to me with a polarizing political idea that many people want to be outraged about. I’ve banned DT for a week for this. It’s also lazy: DT could have searched for things I’ve said on the topic and easily found some . It was also toxic because it was posted shortly after I posted, again, about not wanting to put my energy into politics.
It’s also toxic to try to reduce CF forum activity. DT implied there’s something bad about the forum (without giving any critical arguments or useful feedback) and encouraged talking elsewhere.
@doubtingthomas banned for 2 months for putting inaccurate words in my mouth again and posting about politics after my new rule that he can only post about philosophy.
Doubtingthomas Philosophy Topic - #31 by Elliot
This puts inaccurate words in my mouth instead of using quotes. I don’t think the “people controlling oil” (or e.g. fossil fuel company executives) are good.
It also broke the new rule for @doubtingthomas about only posting about philosophy.
I’ve banned @doubtingthomas for 2 months.
Despite a 2 month ban related to this, plus additional warnings, @doubtingthomas kept posting about politics. He purposefully did things that he knew were bannable. I successfully communicated warnings/instructions as a moderator and he refused to follow the rules. He also kept doing a bad job with quoting and did other bad things. He’s now banned.