Rule Change (New Staff Power)

[KevinM1]

Having been on the staff of another forum, I applaud this move. It's difficult enough to moderate a forum under normal circumstances, but when there's a person who dances at the periphery of the rules it makes the job exponentially more difficult.

At PHPFreaks we had a member named something along the lines of 'DebDoubleD'. She was one of those perpetual rule skirters who would disrupt entire subforums. Her MO would be to ask a coding question, then disagree and bicker with everyone who provided an answer. She was a textbook example of Dunning-Kruger, with the smug insults to match. We had long, heated discussions about her because she didn't technically violate the rules, but essentially shat on the forum every time she was active. It took us two years, IIRC, to finally have enough of her shit and swing the ban hammer, during which time both regular members and staff quit.

Perpetually disruptive assholes need to be removed from forums relatively quickly because they wield disproportionate power. It's incredibly easy for a single person to frustrate a group to the point of not wanting to visit any longer. A powerful but deliberate and limited-in-scope mechanism/process that addresses that kind of destructive outlier is a necessary addition to a staff's toolbox, IMO, regardless of whether it's a new rule or amendments to existing rules.