BC History - the Alexis Principle

Some very interesting conversations from 2009 are about to fall off of MetaBC's old posts, so here are some links so you can check them out if you want to. Vitality and honesty have bans Posted by Coghorne on 2009-August-10 22:35:24, Monday This turned out to be a huge thread with (52) replies and a second thread talking about BC's approach to moderation, which is influenced by the Alexis Principle. a ban is a failure of moral authority...it should be something one does sadly....like whacking an attacking Pit Bull with a shovel..... middy Alexis got it right. Where rules are not broken, where the board's existence and/or security are not threatened, the cogs ought not to intervene. Royal I have a real problem with what you say. BC is a public face of boylove. It is naive to think otherwise. If we allow to stand the hateful, disgusting, racist, and threatening posts that one person makes here, I think that people will be turned away from BC that need it or could be helpful to it and be befuddled by our hypocrisy. How can we expect to be treated with any respect when we allow the same bullshit that hurts us so much in the larger community to stand here? In the least, we need to footnote the Alexis Principle. Our existence could be threatened if we don't. michaelmelsheimer I remember when a troll attacked Gort, telling him what an ugly child he had been (from his sigpic). Our community swooped to his defense, and there were a dozen of us perving, praising, and drooling over his sigpic before Gort even knew he had been attacked. That was the Alexis Principle in action. Puer Aeternus Santi spends a large part of his life posting comments on BC which attack and offend other posters. If another poster happens to say something negative about Santi, he is banned. The credibility of the cogs has sadly reached an all-time low. Graham How Rule 3 came to be The original Campaign of Harassment was waged by tj against PPC. After a lot of bans, PPC had been doing his best at controlling his behavior, but with his inevitable angry slip-ups. tj couldn't stand this, and wanted PPC gone forever. So he posted angry off-topic replies to every PPC post on the board, hoping that PPC would blow up and be banned. Instead we banned tj. The final ejection of PPC came much later. honesty has been attempting to do something similar against Santi, raising the ugliness level so that both of them might be banned. He may eventually succeed, but it will depend on Santi's actions, not on the actions of honesty and the rest of the Santi Club. And until then they don't get to push things along. Maintenance Elf If I understand Alexis correctly, he was against committees deciding what was best for others and while it's a great concept it's not very practical in reality. Rule 3 has made BC useful for many more people than you realize but the trouble is that certain posters will always use it to their advantage trying to rid the board of people they don't like. Newport News We haven't need any protection for trolls aside of bullying them to the extreme and pressing them to leave. I have been doing that for three years at least. The only troll that has a certain immunity for now is this Boring Aeternus, but in better times, like two months ago, the bastard would be history. And as you can easily recall I never had to retort to flooding the board with "ALEXIS!!" or any other faggoty tags. All this hysteria is so gringo! "Look at the trolls! They are everywhere! They are invading us! We need to raise the Troll Alert to orange! Trolls are surrounding us!" Santi