I can say that I've been guilty of responding when I should just ignore some posts, and succeed most of the time but struggle some days.
I know it happens all the time but I wish that threads would get pruned instead of closing good threads and suspend or ban constant abusers.
Here's an example:
On July 1st, I put in 21,088 steps at my employer, mostly on my hands and knees, installing several hundred Covid19 related floor signs. After work, I got in my Suburban, and followed my wife in her car 120 miles south to drop off her car for one of our kids to use, since their car's interference engine broke a timing chain and ate the engine. We ate a quick dinner and I drove 120 miles back home, arriving around midnight. Decided to check in on TBN before going to bed, only to find the getting old thread reported to the mods. So I had to read back through about 45 posts, trying to determine who said what and if it needed attention. It did. So I started selecting posts for pruning from the usual 5-6 people, plus a couple other folks. However, there were 45 posts in that thread that day, multiple arguments, insults, quotes, etc.... after spending about 15 minutes on it, and realizing that pruning would leave it making no sensible conversation left, I closed it around 12:20, as instructed by the owners of TBN, if things get out of hand. I left a note in the moderators area at 12:22am on July 2 letting the moderators and TBN staff know that I closed it, and also left a note that if anyone else wanted to prune it and reopen it, that would be fine with me. Apparently there were no takers.
As to why there were no takers, I won't speak for any of the mods or TBN staff. If I ventured a guess, it would be that they, too, may be tired of the same 5-6 people running threads into the ground and having to clean up after them on an almost daily, if not several times a day basis.
That's why I, for one, am excited that Muhammad is investigating a way to take care of some of these issues with multiple infraction members. I hope it's an automated system that doesn't require moderator input.
As for suspending and/or banning people, that's not a moderator function. It's up to the owners of TBN. The only people that the mods ban are spammers when we decimate them.
I hope that helps explain why some threads are closed VS pruned and left open. They just get so tangled up so fast that it's impossible to trim them up neatly. You want to leave them there for history, but you can't let them continue down the tubes, so you close them and hope people will start another thread with civil conversation. Lately, that's not happening. The same folks just continue in the next one. Hopefully a new system will put an end to that.
