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The Rayaan / Jacob(smooth) Situation
#31
RE: The Rayaan / Jacob(smooth) Situation
I agree that the abuse of power is unpleasant but have to also acknowledge it is a burden to wield. As Poet said, in order to serve as a moderator he must check himself in a way we do not. Since staff receive no pay and presumably start off hanging out here for the larks the same as the rest of us, that truly is a sacrifice. So thanks to Poet, Rayan and the others for their service.

Like you l.b.d., I appreciate the sincerity of the attempt that went into this resolution. I think these forums are aging well and maturing in lots of ways.
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#32
RE: The Rayaan / Jacob(smooth) Situation
Thanks for clearing that up Tiberius.
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#33
RE: The Rayaan / Jacob(smooth) Situation
During this whole event I have thought the first and major mistake was the reason for the investigation, that Jacob was thought to be a possible poe. In your opening post I had interpreted that you thought the investigation was done for the wrong reasons, i.e investigation of a possible poe was wrong. See below:
Quote:Whilst Rayaan may have initially thought he had good reason to look up Jacob on other forums, he (1) used information that was entrusted to atheistforums.org in a way which was not covered by our privacy policy.
Then you replied to Aractus post:
(January 9, 2014 at 2:41 am)Tiberius Wrote:


The investigation of religious beliefs isn't usually done, mainly because being a poe isn't against the rules. It only breaks the rules when the poe starts trolling or otherwise disrupting the forum. Usually people only create poe accounts because they want to troll at some point, so looking into poe accounts (even though being a poe is not against the rules) is done on occasion so that the staff are aware of potential trolls.
Confused Fall
So am I to understand that the reason why Rayann's investigation into Jacob was wrong not because of the possibility that Jacob is a poe, but because Rayanns suspicions for Jacob being a poe was not sufficient.

Personally I do not think the possibility for someone being a poe is a good enough reason for investigation because no rules are broken. Even if someone is trolling is not sufficient reason to investigate their activities outside the forum. They should be warned and banned on their behaviour on this forum only.

At the moment I can only think(other than security which I know hardly anything) of one thing which an investigation like Rayann did should occur, the possibility of a sock account. The evidence of breaking of all the other rules is all within the forum. Not outside. No need to investigate. I have never known anyone being banned for trolling, spamming or flaming outside the forums, always from within.
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#34
RE: The Rayaan / Jacob(smooth) Situation
Quote:Personally I do not think the possibility for someone being a poe is a good enough reason for investigation because no rules are broken. Even if someone is trolling is not sufficient reason to investigate their activities outside the forum. They should be warned and banned on their behaviour on this forum only.
I think a lot of us agree with this and want reassurance that this will be the official policy moving forward.

(January 9, 2014 at 2:41 am)Tiberius Wrote:
(January 8, 2014 at 8:27 am)Aractus Wrote: Tiberius, since you didn't specifically address this part of the privacy policy in your post, could you please clarify the staff's collective opinion on whether my interpretation of this is accurate or if you have a different interpretation of this part of the privacy policy?
That section was added to the policy mainly to clarify that the "requirement" to state your religious views didn't mean you would be banned if you lied about them. However I see now how those words could have the other meaning that you refer to. We will look into making that section more understandable
Okay thanks. Although for what it's worth, as other members commented before I, I'd prefer to see a shift in policy that would reassure members that information regarding outside behaviour will not be monitored officially by the staff.
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#35
RE: The Rayaan / Jacob(smooth) Situation
(January 9, 2014 at 4:33 am)Waratah Wrote: So am I to understand that the reason why Rayann's investigation into Jacob was wrong not because of the possibility that Jacob is a poe, but because Rayanns suspicions for Jacob being a poe was not sufficient.
Rayaan's investigation into Jacob was wrong because he used private information (i.e. his email address) to do a search.

Quote:Personally I do not think the possibility for someone being a poe is a good enough reason for investigation because no rules are broken. Even if someone is trolling is not sufficient reason to investigate their activities outside the forum. They should be warned and banned on their behaviour on this forum only.

At the moment I can only think(other than security which I know hardly anything) of one thing which an investigation like Rayann did should occur, the possibility of a sock account. The evidence of breaking of all the other rules is all within the forum. Not outside. No need to investigate. I have never known anyone being banned for trolling, spamming or flaming outside the forums, always from within.
I think you misunderstood me. At no point did I suggest that someone's behaviour outside of the forum would be cause to have them warned or banned. The only way you get warned or banned is by breaking the rules of this forum, on this forum.

However, we do occasionally search on other forums in order to verify suspicions about a member. For example, if a new member posts a long chunk of text that looks like a copy/paste, we will take sections of that text and search for it on Google. If it shows up in a number of other forums, especially if it was posted recently in those forums, then we know that the person is just going around forums and posting the same thing, which is effectively spamming.

In this situation, Rayaan suspected Jacob to be a poe, and looked into him. If he had just used his username / other public info to do the search, there would have been no problem (anyone on the forum, staff or not, can do the exact same thing). If after searching, he still suspected Jacob to be a poe, he would have informed the staff. At which point, we would not have issued any warnings or bans, because being a poe is not against the rules. Instead, we would have likely just paid a bit more attention to his posts, because as I've stated before, the main reason people create poe accounts is to ultimately start trolling at some point.



Aractus Wrote:Okay thanks. Although for what it's worth, as other members commented before I, I'd prefer to see a shift in policy that would reassure members that information regarding outside behaviour will not be monitored officially by the staff.
I can't stand behind that policy shift because it would effectively prevent us from checking on suspected spammers. In case you didn't read my above response to Waratah, let me make this clear:

We won't ever warn or ban someone for doing something outside of the forums. If a member posts as an atheist here, and we see their same username posting as a Christian somewhere else, we aren't going to ban them. We might monitor them more closely on AF because they may start trolling, but until they actually break the rules here, we have no reason to punish them.
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#36
RE: The Rayaan / Jacob(smooth) Situation
(January 9, 2014 at 4:33 am)Waratah Wrote: I have never known anyone being banned for trolling, spamming or flaming outside the forums, always from within.

I have. I provided one situation below where we have done this.

As Tiberius just said, sometimes we have searched for information externally as well - by using public information - and then we used that information "internally" (in this forum) only when necessary. Thus we may decide to search for external contents of suspicious members, but we won't "use" them against you in any ay until you start breaking the rules in this forum. That is my understanding of the rule "Your information is used internally only when necessary" as written in the privacy policy. Tiberius will correct me if I am wrong about this.

The policy doesn't say, "Your internal information is used internally only when necessary." It says, "Your information ..." so it could be both internal and external.

To prove this, here is one example where outside investigation was used against a member:

(August 1, 2012 at 7:17 pm)cato123 Wrote:


Upon seeing those links, the mods poked around in other sites to gather more knowledge about that poster, and later banned him:
Moderator Wrote:



But, again, an action was taken against that member (or we used the information internally) only because it was verified from our investigation that he was a spammer (i.e. he was copy-pasting a lot of stuff across different forums and not participating in discussions), which is against the rules of this forum. As Tiberius told you already, the only way you will get warned or banned is by breaking the rules of this forum, on this forum. We won't ever punish you unless you start breaking the rules in this forum.
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#37
RE: The Rayaan / Jacob(smooth) Situation
I see no problem with googling stuff people have written. In the same way that attacking someone's words is not attacking them, investigating someone's words is not the same as investigating them.

Also I'm amused that my autocorrect tries to change googling to "go ogling". Arf.
"Peace is a lie, there is only passion.
Through passion, I gain strength.
Through strength, I gain power.
Through power, I gain victory.
Through victory, my chains are broken."
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#38
RE: The Rayaan / Jacob(smooth) Situation
(January 9, 2014 at 2:47 pm)Jacob(smooth) Wrote: I see no problem with googling stuff people have written. In the same way that attacking someone's words is not attacking them, investigating someone's words is not the same as investigating them.

(Nothing in this post should be construed to reflect official policy or the opinion of anyone other than myself)

I think that it's very important that a distinction is drawn between what is and what is not publicly visible. From my perspective (both as an ordinary member and a member of staff), there is no issue with doing an external search based on what a member chooses to make visible to others.

Using information that requires escalated privilege should be done only with a) adequate justification, and b) sufficient oversight. Furthermore, I cannot think of many situations where it would be necessary to do so.

Fortunately, moderators simply do not have access to the bulk of that information - only a poster's IP address is visible beyond what the general public can see.
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#39
RE: The Rayaan / Jacob(smooth) Situation
(January 9, 2014 at 2:42 pm)Rayaan Wrote:
Moderator Wrote:


(the moderator quoted above is me)

In this typical case, what was done was to take a representative sample of the post in question and run it through google, looking for matches. We already had a sample of links to go on, provided by the member who reported the post. We did nothing more or less than what I presume the reporter did - search on the post's content.

This is IMHO a very clear cut example of one of the few circumstances where off-site investigation using public information is perfectly OK.

(January 9, 2014 at 2:42 pm)Rayaan Wrote: But, again, an action was taken against that member (or we used the information internally) only because it was verified from our investigation that he was a spammer (i.e. he was copy-pasting a lot of stuff across different forums and not participating in discussions), which is against the rules of this forum. As Tiberius told you already, the only way you will get warned or banned is by breaking the rules of this forum, on this forum. We won't ever punish you unless you start breaking the rules in this forum.

While all that you say above is true, I'm getting the sense that the discomfort rises above just what will or will not get you in trouble here. Many people are uncomfortable with the idea of being looked into using privileged information, for it's own sake.
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#40
RE: The Rayaan / Jacob(smooth) Situation
Meh, searches - smerches. I don't care about any of you anywhere near enough to spend time looking your real name up.
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