Swinging the axe ever so wildly / Reposted from Flickr

Posted to the discussion section for the Chicago Photography group on Flickr at 10:43PM, 18 April 2012 CST: At this point, out of the 2,013 people who've joined this group, I've banned 7 people permanently. That's 0.35 percent of the total membership, rounding upward, banned over a period of 4 years, meaning that each year I'm banning about .09 percent of the membership, again, rounding upward. Naturally, this massive bloodletting has raised questions, worries about who could be next. I will now address those questions by telling you why people got banned, without naming names.



0. Listed as banned member 0, not 1, because he didn't stay banned. What he did was post an advertisement for another group to this group, and to a number of other local groups. He's still banned in at least one of them, or at least was, when we last spoke.

I banned him, and sent him an e-mail explaining why. He apologized, explaining that he had done so at the request of the owner of the group for which he was posting advertising. Going to the group, I could see that such a request had, indeed, been posted by one of the admins. I let him back into the group, and as near as I can tell, he's never done anything like that, since. I could sort of see his point of view, I think - would an admin ask people to do something that they shouldn't do?

Sad to say, the answer to this was "yes", as the member saw, himself. When I ban people, I want to do it because they mean to do wrong, not because they're being a little careless or a little too trusting. I feel good about the decision to re-admit, and think that it has been supported by the outcome.









1. Another spamming incident, this one a lot less forgivable. The first guy acted in response to an admin's request, and as a lot of fora really are run as fiefdoms, I could understand that. This next person was advertising his own forum, and acting on the request of nobody but himself.

The differences didn't stop there. Unlike the first person, this man reposted his advertisement within hours of the deletion of the first copy, trying to turn the matter into a test of wills. When he was politely asked to stop doing this, he responded, not with an apology, but with a profanity laced piece of abuse. Further, unlike deleted user # 0, he was advertising something that was not a Flickr group, It was an outside, for profit website. As an admin, I'm required to squash such advertising on sight, and understandably so.

The user was just being a jerk. I banned him, I forget how many years ago, and wouldn't dream of letting him back in. Why would I?









2. Looking at my list of banned members, I can see when user #1 was asked to leave - April 28, 2009, a little over three years ago. Until very recently, he was the only permanently banned member in the history of the group. Not that he was the only one I wanted to ban.

We had a friend who would sign up for the group, deposit his pictures of the World Naked Bike Ride each year, setting all of the photos to safe, posting them to this and a number of other groups that aren't 18+, either. He would then unsubscribe before I had a chance to ban him, leaving me to play whacamole with this clown on a yearly basis.

Every time he did this, he put the group in danger of deletion. A well known (notorious, in fact) feature of Flickr's management style - the staff will wipe out well established communities of thousands of people because of the misconduct of a few members. This has been complained about in the help forum, by others. I log in every day, most of the time, but I can not be logged in, constantly. There is going to be at least a small delay between the submission of an offensive item, and my discovery of the fact that it is there. I can only hope, in each case, that I see the offending photo before a Flickr employee does. The system is just that unreasonable and that unfair.

In Mid March, I find another one of those photos uploaded, set to safe, with some guy's exposed genitalia almost at the geometric center of the shot, suggesting that our friend - let's call him "Tim" - was zooming in on that organ, and was thrown off a little by the movement of the cyclist. How lovely.

When you signed up, you might have noticed that rules were posted, and "no nudity" has been one of those posted rules, since the first few minutes of this group's life. I think that those might have been the first two words I wrote, and they're part of a set of rules that you all agreed to abide by, when you joined. Children will be coming through here, eventually, if they haven't already, so posting R rated material here, without setting it to restricted or at least moderate, really isn't cool. It's also a TOS violation that, again, puts the group in danger of deletion. Heather has explained the settings required for nudity in no uncertain terms, in the help forum.

Sometimes, I will agree that the community guidelines (as interpreted by the staff) can be unreasonably prudish, such as when we see the requirement that photos of "naked statues" being set to moderate or restricted, but I am going to enforce them. I don't see the issue as being one of sufficient importance to justify endangering the group, and even if I disagree, it's something that I can live with. So, I do and feel that I should, and yes, I think that's a moral choice.

Picture how quickly things would break down, if every time Flickr needed to set policy or take action, it had to explain itself in full detail and win the assent of every single users. The company would never get anything done, but the staff would spend all of its time trying to reason with us. So, unless a policy is really egregiously, evilly horrible or blatantly, destructively insane - which is not the same as being whimsical - I'll abide by it, agreeing to disagree.

Some people have a problem with that. Some people need to get over it.



I was talking about that shot centered on the cyclist's manhood, wasn't I? I posted a comment on the photo, asking "Tim" if he thought what he was doing was funny, and whether he was at all bothered by the thought of the hardship he'd be working on those who had put time and effort into building up groups that he might very well have ended up destroying. How about the communities that would be dispersed? How about the impact on the users who were meeting through those?

One of his friends then denied seeing that which was in clear view. I told her where it was, as if it were hard to find on a naked guy on a bicycle. Tim deleted my comments, and without a single apology, wrote "what a creep", as if he had been victimized by an admin's horrific insistence that he started abiding by the rules of the group, the TOS and the Community Guidelines - as he had already agreed to do. As if to make sure that the impact of the backbiting was not lost, the friend then said that she was sorry, that she had no idea that I would "act that way", while remaining vague about the details, implying misconduct that had been altogether absent in my case, while linking to my profile.

"Tim", again, was not just breaking the rules, but getting an attitude about it. Our fried carries on the backbiting to this day, but he doesn't carry on the posting in this group. Shortly after our exchange, Tim was back on the membership list, when I logged in. "Yes!", I think. "There is a G-d!". I banned him, and the game of whacamole was finally over. That one, at any rate.









3. This next person never left the group until he was sent out of it. I am not using the generic masculine of traditional English, as I write this - all of the banned members of this group are male.

Like "Tim", he had his own way of playing games. He would post photos in which the models were clearly nude, but nothing was showing. I think he was trying to shock me and it didn't work. There really are only four ways in which I've been annoyed by nudity in the past few years:

a. By some guy's member flapping a few inches from my dinner plate, because the route for the world naked bike ride has been set to go up a narrow street lined with sidewalk cafes, he's chosen to swing way over to the right side of the street while northbound, and then stand up in the pedals while screaming "whooo!" and leaving no doubt in the minds of all witnessing this, that he had enjoyed the ride far too much.

I can do without that. Thank you.



b. By children being invited to the show, in a place where children should reasonably be expected to be. Hence, the no nudity rule on this group, which I intend to show to my nieces and nephews, someday, and hope that some of you will feel free to show to the little ones in your own family. I am not a creepy uncle and am not willing to become one, just to appease a few people who aren't willing to let go of their adolescences.

There are some things that I will firmly maintain that children do not need to see. These are things that society, in general, has decided that children do not need to see and so, without fear that I will be called a dictator by anybody other than a few members of the lunatic fringe, I will declare this subject closed to discussion. Because I find it to be a really creepy subject.

Anybody who disagrees is free to start his own group. It's a big Internet out there, and I'm sure one can find a place to do just about anything out there. This just won't be the place.



c. By disrespect being shown to the model - yes, even in a self-portrait - and the natural beauty of the human form being turned to ugliness. There is a difference between artistic figure studies and porn.



d. By disregarding the TOS, putting a group in danger of deletion, thus engaging in gross inconsideration.

None of this has much to do with prudishness, so the user, finding that his attempts o shock and horrify me were proving fruitless (I guess), kept on posting pictures of some fairly decent looking models until, on March 29, he decided to put the private parts of one of his models on display, with the photo set to safe. Again, I took action, because I really didn't have a choice. The member threw a fit because he was corrected in public - in the comments for his photo - and some of his friends joined in on the abuse. He flouted the rules, got an attitude about the issue, and was gone. Notice a trend?

The issue, to me, is not just "what has a person done", but "what should I reasonably expect him to do in the future". If he does something that's clearly, grossly wrong, and has been creeping up to the edge of that wrongness for over a year, and then gets defiant about it, the only rational conclusion that I can draw is that, given the chance, he'll do the same again. This time, watching the group like a hawk as I often do, I caught the photo before an employee did. Next time, I and we might not be so lucky, so to be anything less than harsh in my response, under the circumstances, would have been both foolish and inconsiderate on my part. Besides which, the rules are clear cut on these points.









If all expulsions were based on behavior seen in this group, this is where the list would stop, and it is where the list stopped, until today. But, as much as some people will not like this idea, when I see somebody showing that he is a problem on another group, I consider that to be a perfectly valid reason to ban him from this one, and why not?

This, as I've said from the beginning, is something like my virtual living room. I'm going to do my best to be fair to each of you, because that's what a good host does, but I'm not going to obsess on legalistic hairsplitting, at the expense of basic common sense. If I see somebody smashing up my neighbor's living room - or a room in one of my other homes, should I have more than one - do I then invite him into my own, or do I let myself see that borrowing somebody else's troubles (or my own) would just be foolish?

I've got groceries to buy and dinner to cook. I'll pick this up, later. Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow, depending on how tired I feel.









4. The short form, as this has been discussed elsewhere: One of our people posts a photo to another group. It's a good photo - not a great photo, but a good photo - but the story that comes with it is appalling. The photographer claims to have passed a woman on the street, snapped her photo in that very public place, and to have been pepper sprayed in response. What was appalling, at first, was that the photographer seemed to be arguing that this would have been a valid thing for her to have done, and that he owed her an apology, because she did something violent, and that surely she couldn't be judged for her actions.

The victims of violence owe an apology to the perpetrators of it? Morality has been turned on its head, when this is accepted.

On being asked about this, he responded to a reasonable argument (one to the effect that what he alleged that the woman had done would have been a psychotic response, not a valid one) by going off on a psychotic rant of his own about who he could take down, one in which he wasn't making much sense. He reversed his earlier position, tried to claim on this basis that his earlier position had been misrepresented, trying to sell this lie by lying about the order in which the comments and replies had been made, before reversing himself yet again. He then tried to cyberstalk and defame everybody with the same name as his target, who happened to a web page, linking to each page in turn, and lying about the contents of each. He'll have fun with the cyberstalking, I'm sure, given just how many people share that name, but he's not going to have that kind of fun in here.

The wrongness of this was so outstanding on so many different levels, that there was no question about banning this guy. Just the fact that he'd go that crazy about the suggestion that violence in response to photography is really not acceptable was reason enough, on its own. Unstable people should not kept around, and when they're unstable people who try to detract attention from their own instability through character assassination, no decision could be made clearer than the one to say goodbye to the guy has, at that point, become.

The only thing that I'm left doubting is the truthfulness of his story about what brought on the woman's behavior. I find it hard to believe that somebody who was that much of a creep last night, was the perfect gentleman he claimed to be on the street, when the photo was taken. The woman in the photo might have had a very good reason for spraying him that we haven't been told about, but there can be no excuse for the man's behavior afterwards.









5, 6, 7. A trio of me-too trolls, after the events mentioned about took place, and banned member 4 had, most deservedly, been tossed out of the other group, dropped by the psychopath's photo, to post messages of support for him and his position.

They were three of our people, sad to say. I booted them the moment I saw what they had done. To encourage in trolling is to engage in it.








8. (?) Somebody who hasn't been banned, yet, but only because he unsubscribed before he could. He dropped by this group, to post a rant about the evil persecution of banned member # 4, the guy who started talking about doing violence, in response to a condemnation of somebody else's alleged violence.

"Flick is supposed to be fun", this person whined in a troll post that I've deleted. Yes, it is, and having maniacs and their defenders around is not fun, so out they go. Nightclubs are supposed to be fun, too, but that doesn't mean that they don't have bouncers.









What each of you will gather from this, is up to you, but what you should gather from this is getting thrown out of this group is not really that easy. You really have to work at being a jerk before I tell you to go, and do things that nobody with even the faintest hint of common sense or common decency would dream of doing.

Why this exists: An Introduction

In real life, especially that part of real life lived online, there are these people who, for the lack of a better (and less offensive) word, we shall call "sphincters." Difficult people who are not trying to be anything other than difficult. As an administrator of a number of groups, I get to deal with these magical folk, and with the fact that they love to tell stories that cast their own morally questionable exploits in a far more positive light than they deserve, at the expense of those who've had to deal with the disruption that those exploits have caused. As much as I'd like to be able to just ignore these people, I really can't, not unless I'd like the rumor mill to run out of control and my own membership to get the wrong idea about what has been a generally good natured (but still assertive) administrative style - mine.

Given the type of group I try to run, that matters a lot. Yes, I could probably get away with just bullying people into silence at the first sign of dissent, as the seeming success of a lot of groups run that way shows, if I were that kind of person, and having done so, find myself in firm control of exactly the joyless sort of group I'd deserve. But that's not what I've ever set out to do. Don't get me wrong - if somebody is genuinely, aggressively (or passive aggressively) being a pain, I will (without apology) toss him out of the group, much as I would remove an unruly guest from my living room. I have done so before - but I haven't done so often, gladly or lightly. At the time of this writing, the total number of users banned from a group of over 2,100 people that has existed since 2008 is 18, and the only reason the number has climbed even that high is because a few people who got banned (with ample cause) went out to recruit a few of their equally trollish friends, and had them come over to make trouble. The theory seemed to be that I was either going to let them back into the group, just to make peace, or pay the price in one way or another. One of the ways in which I was going to pay for this was in an increase in what had been the very low number of people I had banned. Before one particular incident, in which the aforementioned friends were recruited (one which will be mentioned on this blog), only four people had ever been banned, and one of them had been reinstated.

That's not a lot of people (not in a group of over 2000 people), and the bannings were unquestionably justified - two spammers and two posters of adult content. One of the spammers, having been put up to it by the admin of another group, apologized and I let bygones be bygones. Then came somebody who was really special, who had publicly announced his willingness to inflict bodily harm on others. Having banned him out of obvious safety concerns, I found that a small contingent of members was willing to publicly support the psychotic fellow in his search for what he claimed to imagine was justice, and then screamed about the injustice of it all as they found that I had banned them, too - and why wouldn't I?

In the beginning, when I started running groups, I'd go along with the completely unreasonable expectation that I spell out a detailed set of rules that would explain to one and all exactly what would and would not be acceptable as behavior, leaving me with the question "who is going to read this." I can't think of every bizarre, anti-social thing a member could do and if I could, imagine how long that litany of potential woes would be. So long that surely nobody would read it all, and thus, so long that it wouldn't serve as being anything but an excuse to spring an unpleasant surprise on hapless users who would then be told that ignorance of the law was no excuse. Far better to use a less formal method of telling people what was expected of them and offered to them. After listing a few rules (eg. no nudity), I explained what I was trying to do as an admin, what my philosophy of management was, and then invited them to use their common sense.

As I've said before, my group is like my virtual living room, the members are my guests and I am their host at this party to which our younger relatives are invited. If one has anything resembling common sense and common decency, and even the most modest social skills, few (if any) surprises are to be found in the management decisions I make or the relatively few ejections I've carried out. If one goes out and spreads rumors at the expense of one's host, does one really expect to continue being invited to his parties? If one is not completely insane, I mean? But a lot of people are either that - nut, just nuts - or are having fun pretending to be; eg. the owner of a car dealership who posting a rant in the discussion section after I told him that he wouldn't be allowed to advertise any more cars in my group. Again, same old theory - "give me what I want, or I'll create a hostile environment in your group that will halt activity in it, because nobody will want to deal with that" - and he didn't become one of the 18 banned members until he resorted that that attempt at strong arming, in order to win a right for himself to post spam. I would have been within my rights to ban him without warning, and probably that would have been prudent, but I did try to reason with him first, as much as he will try to pretend otherwise. He did not stumble into trouble blindly, he came storming into it looking for a fight, and that's what got him thrown out of the group.

That's what I want people to understand, and part of why this blog is here - I really am running a "mellow show", as I've said in the past, I'm just not being a wimp about it. I'm going to try to maintain a more than reasonable level of transparency - as reasonable as privacy concerns will allow - because as an admin, I really don't have anything to hide, and both I and my group benefit when this is seen. The vast majority of the members of my group - thousands of people - have no desire to act like jerks (as far as I can tell), and it is good ... no, it is important for them to know that as long as they're trying to be good people in my group, they should feel free to relax. If they have a bad day, like that one reinstated member did, and there's a misunderstanding, that's nothing we can't fix. The one thing that really has gotten people in trouble, when they've stayed in trouble on my group, has been the attempt to win through intimidation or harassment (in some form), in cases in which they were clearly in the wrong or by putting the group at risk for deletion - in other words, by going out of their way to act like jerks. Having done so, they've then made a fuss, because that's what jerks do, when they're in the wrong, more often than not. They go on trying to win through intimidation and deceit, just like before.





That's tells you why I write about these incidents (sometimes), but it doesn't tell you why I have a whole blog devoted to them. Perhaps you might wonder about that? Simple enough. While some people will have concerns, wondering if they really can relax in my groups, a lot of other people won't ever want to hear about any of this drama, and I don't blame them. Really, most of this is boring stuff. Man shows up, posts pictures of somebody's penis, and then screams about homophobia because I don't want the children in my extended family to see that. "Are we really even having that discussion?", somebody will ask, and my answer has to be "I'm afraid so." But I don't have to make him wade through this junk on his way to read about something more interesting. I separate this out so that it can be avoided, both by those who, having learned that they can count on me to be at least reasonably fair (I would never claim to be perfect), don't need the reassurance any more, and by those who would never have wanted to read any of this in the first place.

I will absolutely not take it personally if you fall in the second group. I probably would, for reasons that point to why the legalism I reject in running my groups isn't as reasonable as it might look, at first. Really, how much is at stake in the decisions I make as an admin? When I throw somebody out of a group, I'm not depriving him or his freedom or his property, either tangible or intangible (eg. his web pages). There are plenty of other groups, some of which will have many of the same people, so if I make a bad call, this will hurt me more than it will hurt the member, and if truth be told, we're both going to be walking away from the incident without serious harm. This being the case, there's no reason to set up anything like a set of statutes for my groups, and every reason not to. I assume we've all heard of wikilawyering or pettifoggery? The more formal a system becomes, the more easily it is gamed, and the less cause it gives anybody for relaxation.

Isn't relaxation the reason we're all supposed to be here, in the first place? How funny that so many of us seem to forget that so often, and perhaps, along the way, forget why they came online, in the beginning. I'm guessing that in most cases, it wasn't for the drama. So, read this or don't, it's all good, this is just a reference and, as I've admitted, not a very interesting one, probably.





How can you follow this blog, which I expect won't be updated very often? I don't know, yet, but probably there will be some pages on Twitter (and elsewhere) which it will share with a few "gripe groups" on Flickr - groups I've set up, in which people can take their disputes into the discussion section, while the photo section is reserved for something light and amusing, and somehow tangentially related to what is going on in the shouting matches in the discussion section, but not really. So, goofy fun photos to go with the not so fun goofiness covered on the blog, giving non-masochists a reason to subscribe to the update microblogs. With any luck, there will be enough subscribers that word of a rebuttal will get around, and I'll be able to largely forget about the rumor mill, because rumors will be quickly squashed. With even more luck, I'll have run into the last of the idiots, and the update microblogs will have nothing but links to fun stuff.

I'd like that and who knows? Maybe that will happen. Let's find out.