Perhaps Ban From Threads And Not The Forum

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I hate it when people get banned. Perhaps it is possible to ban certain members from being in the same thread as an adversary, rather than ban them from the forum. If Goldfish and Ezra can't get along then they should have been separated not banned. John Powell could have stayed, and just be prohibited from news and politics ( I know, not an easy task.)
I have an aspie friend who could kill me in political discussions and she's a sweety. Something doesn't feel right or maybe I'm just naive. Ezra is a good guy, tell members to PM each other to death, just don't ban them for behaving like two dogs fighting over a lady dog in heat.

Got to agree with the essence of this suggestion. Ezra once made a jokey remark in one of the 'Random Discussion' threads to the effect that he was the only genuine Aspie on this site, and to judge from a recent comment by one of the present mods, he could easily have been banned or at least given a stern warning on the strength of that alone today. Utterly ludicrous. Why not just ban every member with 'non-progressive' opinions and rename this site 'Snowflake Central' or something?

Nobody likes seeing genuine users banned. It's very rarely our first course of action - unless you're a spammer or the purest form of troll, then usually we'll start off with a quiet PM, before moving to formal warnings, then short bans, longer bans, and then if all else fails, permanent bans. Quite a large part of the job is informal mediation along the lines of the "topic ban" you're suggesting. So we might try to help a user understand another point of view, or explain why they're provoking particular reactions, or that a certain topic is clearly an emotive one for them and perhaps they should try certain strategies before approaching it.

I am unaware of any forum that has the ability to ban users from a given topic. That would naturally be fraught with difficulty.

There are ways (not presently available to WrongPlanet moderators) that users could be banned from a sub-forum. I do see the appeal, but I'm not sure it would work for various reasons. The biggest of these is that this would doubtless lead to the exact same accusations of "censorship" that are already levelled. Imagine telling a user who thinks the whole world is against them that they can't go into political discussions any more.

Anyone concerned that moderators can't spot jokes and react appropriately is barking up the wrong tree.

You'll appreciate that I can't really go into the specifics of any given user, but we always, always give people plenty of chances if we think there's any chance that they're genuinely trying to be part of the community.

You have a beautiful heart, Teach

I agree this situation could have been prevented and handled in a more fair manner, especially considering it's been going on for a very long time

Goldfish needs to stop using the news forum as a soap box for his personal political beliefs,75% of his news posts belong in PPR and he is not the friendliest of debaters either,which also makes him more suited to PPR.

I don't want to use the "T" word it seem the moderator attention is in order.

ezra doesn't have a good filter when speaking his mind unintentionally angers people. some of his warnings and temp bans were lame tho. he got a 30 day ban for posting images of the word "fnord". he got a 30 day ban for posting a restaurant logo "trolling meme" which another mod lifted after a few days because it was unjustified. he got official warnings for how he reacted to 50 year olds bullying him when he was 16. there are moderators that didn't like him mostly because of his politics. if ezra had stayed out of political discussions his record would have been a lot cleaner.

There could certainly be technological improvements that would make things better, most importantly a real filter that would make posts from people on your "foes" list disappear. (As it is now, the "foes" list doesn't really do much of anything.)

But the deeper problem is that no matter what the technological system, corrupt people can work around it to achieve corrupt ends. It doesn't really matter whether people get a joke or not; a corrupt moderator can use whatever is said, joke or not, to manufacture a pretext and retaliate against someone for political or other reasons. The ancient Romans knew the problem well: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who will moderate the moderators?)

"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" == "Who watches the watchers?"

I don't know the history but I never had a problem with either of them. That said I'm sure the mods had their reasons & I also think that the mods are being very lenient cuz discussing banned members is against the rules. In the past mods had locked threads discussing banned members.

some mods don't even try to appear to be impartial

I forgot to say that the mods have a very tough job on this site & I do not envy them. We do NOT have all the details & know all the history. Walrus said that members get lots of chances & we do NOT know the PM exchanges between them & mods.