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I'm sorry to hark on about this but....

Surely said:
I was sent a PM and the Profile Warning at the same time. The mod took the time to personalize the PM...... because of that, I wondered why he didn't just PM me and not bother with the Profile Warning. I mean, if he was writing the PM anyway, why bother with the PW? It would have been more courteous.
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When we click on the infraction button it basically has some preset mumbo jumbo and a space for a PM. If we don't write anything in the PM space it still sends a PM. If we do fill it out, it's just inserted into the infraction PM. Sometimes I don't fill it out if it's blatantly obvious why the infraction occurred. The PM you're referring to was the one generated by the infraction system I'm guessing as I see the person that gave you that infraction did fill out that space.

Using the infraction system is easier since aside from this it also logs it "in the record books" for us instead of us having to make notes manually. We definitely could send a PM and log it separately but it's a lot nicer for us to do it this way. It gives us a link to the post the infraction was generated on, it saves the PM for us to look at later (which is why I can see it now), and it gives us a thread to place any additional information we might need later. Also we can't generate multiple infractions off one post so in the event that multiple mods are looking at it, you'd only end up with one infraction.

If they did it the long route you might end up with multiple PMs from multiple mods about the same issue. It's rare that that would happen but still.

Overall infractions save us a lot of time. I would hope forum-goers could at least trust us on that. We certainly aren't doing it to make our lives harder.

To anybody, why does it matter if it shows up in your profile for only you and the moderators to see? Why are you looking at your profiles anyway? I'm not being weird about it, I'm really curious. I just looked at my profile and nothing there seemed very interesting to me. But I may be overlooking something about viewing ones own profile. I understand many of us browse differently so I'm curious in part because maybe there's something convenient there for me too. :eek:
 
^^ As I mentioned before, it doesn't bother me that it's still in my profile, so someone else will have to answer that for you.

I see what you're saying, and I could understand why it might be easier at times to go with an infraction instead of a PM for record keeping purposes.

However, in my particular case, if that mod took the time to "correct" my signature three times prior to the Profile Warning/PM (the only reason I know it was the fourth time is because the PM states: "For the 4th time your signature has been edited to remove blank lines"), wouldn't it have just been easier to PM me the first time?

Or even after the second time after seeing I did it again? A simple: "hey, don't put a blank line in your sig" PM would have sufficed. Why keep track of it (I'm assuming manually, since I didn't receive a PW until the fourth one) while it happened four times and then go with the PW/PM combo at that point?

Look, I'm not trying to make a thing out of this. It's really not that big a deal to me. I just found it off-putting at the time. I don't expect anything from you guys........ I just wanted to communicate my thoughts on that particular situation so that you could see it from my point of view as well.
 
WildCowboy said:
The thinking behind silent modifications to user's signatures has simply been that they are such a minor issue that we just make the change and move on rather than spending the time to PM the affected users. The vast majority of users never notice (or at least never comment on) the changes.

Only when we've altered a user's signature several times will we reach out to them to inform them of the issue. We've typically done this using the infraction/warning system as it provides a convenient mechanism for contacting the user while also documenting the incident for the mod staff.

Could there be some room for improvement? Perhaps, and that's something we'll talk about as a staff. From our perspective, warnings we issue through the infraction system are generally for minor issues and we treat them almost just like an enhanced PM, and we don't expect users to take things more seriously than that.

But it seems like a number of users have a different perspective on them, whether it be from the boilerplate wording they receive in the messages, or the continued appearance of the incidents on their user profile pages.

The mods have a "wishlist" of changes we'd like to see made to the infraction/warning system if we could rebuild it from scratch ourselves, but in reality that is unlikely to occur. But that doesn't mean we can't talk about ways to make better use of the existing system, and we'll be looking at that.

Thanks for your input, everyone.
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If it's such a minor problem, why micromanage it? We have plenty of restrictions in place to ensure it cannot be made too wordy, big and gaudy, why not just leave it at that? (unless it's been reported as a real eyesore of a signature.)

If it's simply intolerable to let people space their signatures how they like, then it should probably be handled better than it is currently. If it's important enough to the MR team to edit a space or a line out of signatures then shouldn't it be important enough to "reach out" with a quick PM notifying the user BEFORE dealing out an infraction that will be permanently viewable?

I am actually nervous to even post this and call attention to myself and that's just crazy. I think I'm a pretty harmless, decent long-time member (if I do say so myself) and I have a comparatively small and subtle signature theme; the notion of it possibly earning me an infraction if I space it how I want is really disheartening. These newly implemented eggshells are starting to make my feet tired. I suppose I just don't understand the need to sweat the small things like this.

Text can't convey tone so please don't take this as some big whinging sob-fest or as some sort of righteous indignation. I've not had any real troubles with this but I wouldn't want to either. I would just like to put my two pennies in and maybe inspire you all to question/reconsider why and how you're handling these signature edits.
 
xUKHCx said:
For consecutive posts it is not a case of one issue = infraction.

You were PM'ed about consecutive posts in the past and it was a long standing running issue. The next step after a PM and continued consecutive posts is an infraction.

Just because it was associated with one post does not mean that that is the whole story.
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That doesn't fit with my experience. I got an infraction for consecutive posting the other day (I posted 2 posts in a row). I had never consecutive posted before, nor had I received any warning about consecutive posting by PM. I was a first time offender and I got an infraction.

If you are correct when you say "For consecutive posts it is not a case of one issue = infraction.", then my infraction was incorrectly applied - so please can you remove it. thanks.
 
One important thing I'm getting out of this is that people want warnings when minor issues are taken care of in their posts/sigs. They want warnings right away, not the second or third time, so they know exactly what's going on. Am I right (feedback appreciated!)?

Another thing is that people like PMs. The warning/infraction system generates PMs, and we should make these PMs a bit more personal more often. Am I right?


I tend to add more to the PM when there's a reason to do it (= where more explanation is needed and/or would clearly be helpful or appreciated), but if it's obvious (posting a MP thread outside of MP, for example) and the message and link from the rules says it all, I don't add anything else. Basically I try to keep the message short, because a lot of the responses I get show that people don't actually read the message. They ask questions that were answered there. I feel like adding text only makes it worse, but I do do it when I feel it might be appreciated or necessary.

What Panda says about it being more convenient to use the warning/infraction system is right. Creating personal PMs outside the system and documenting them takes more time, and it doesn't make sense to do that for minor issues when there's a better way built into the system. And I do think it's important to take care of the minor issues. IMO it's one of the things that keeps the forums clean and easy to read. Big problems are another ball of wax, for another thread. :p
 
iBlue said:
If it's important enough to the MR team to edit a space or a line out of signatures then shouldn't it be important enough to "reach out" with a quick PM notifying the user BEFORE dealing out an infraction that will be permanently viewable?
Click to expand...

One other thing I failed to note before is that the signature rules are displayed each time a member edits his or her signature. The rule about blank lines and lines of punctuation is even in bold.

Shouldn't we be able to expect users to take some responsibility and read the rules for themselves...especially rules in bold an inch above where they're typing?

We try to make things as obvious as possible so that we don't HAVE to send PMs and people don't HAVE to ask us why a certain action was done...it's easier and more efficient for everyone, so we do what we can within the limits of vBulletin and our tolerance for employing changes that could break in the future.

(I'm certainly not targeting this at you, iBlue...it's just a general question inspired your quote of and response to my earlier post.)
 
WildCowboy said:
One other thing I failed to note before is that the signature rules are displayed each time a member edits his or her signature. The rule about blank lines and lines of punctuation is even in bold.

Shouldn't we be able to expect users to take some responsibility and read the rules for themselves...especially rules in bold an inch above where they're typing?

We try to make things as obvious as possible so that we don't HAVE to send PMs and people don't HAVE to ask us why a certain action was done...it's easier and more efficient for everyone, so we do what we can within the limits of vBulletin and our tolerance for employing changes that could break in the future.

(I'm certainly not targeting this at you, iBlue...it's just a general question inspired your quote of and response to my earlier post.)
Click to expand...

It would be nice if you start sending infractions (if you aren't already) for those who constantly have the one word titles (like, HELP!) or the titles that say nothing about what the thread is.
 
It seems like part of the issue with the infraction system, is the canned wording of the PMs, and the red/yellow card in the profile, makes it look like it's something very serious, when it's probably not. I understand it makes it easier for the admins, but I guess if I were to receive an infraction for a minor signature violation, I might think it's more serious than a personalized PM from an admin that says "Hey, just a quick note, I removed an extra space from your signature. Kthxbai"
 
WildCowboy said:
One other thing I failed to note before is that the signature rules are displayed each time a member edits his or her signature. The rule about blank lines and lines of punctuation is even in bold.

Shouldn't we be able to expect users to take some responsibility and read the rules for themselves...especially rules in bold an inch above where they're typing?

We try to make things as obvious as possible so that we don't HAVE to send PMs and people don't HAVE to ask us why a certain action was done...it's easier and more efficient for everyone, so we do what we can within the limits of vBulletin and our tolerance for employing changes that could break in the future.

(I'm certainly not targeting this at you, iBlue...it's just a general question inspired your quote of and response to my earlier post.)
Click to expand...

Slightly embarrassed that I've never noticed it. I probably read it ages ago and now I just seem to glance right over it. D'OH!

I think that rule is rather control-freaky and petty though. :eek: It's just a line. For instance when I noticed that an indent caused a carriage return I used some underscores just to push my text off to the side a little because I preferred it to look that way. It sounds like that's against the rules, but why?

(I'll try to simulate a signature example here)

What makes this acceptable:


[post here]
______________
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.​


and this not:


[post here]
______________

_______ The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.


?

I really don't want to be a big pain in your collective arses because I know you've got plenty of that going around here already but this is something that perked up my WTF meter and I was hoping I could be granted a little questioning of it.
 
iBlue said:
For instance when I noticed that an indent caused a carriage return I used some underscores just to push my text off to the side a little because I preferred it to look that way. It sounds like that's against the rules, but why?
Click to expand...

Both of your examples are fine...using underscores to indent text is not against the rules.

As you note, the INDENT tag adds in blank lines beyond the text included within the tags, and that's why we don't allow it. Same with the QUOTE tag. (Of course, now that you bring it up, I see that the rules about tags aren't included on the "Edit Signature" page...only in the Forum Rules. We should update that.)

We're just trying to keep the height of signatures to a minimum due to the fact that they appear under every single post and users have to scroll past them to read forum pages. And they can distract from post content by breaking up the thread of the conversation. Obviously we minimize that greatly just by disallowing images in sigs, but still, we like to encourage people to make wider sigs rather than tall, skinny ones to help even more with that.

Is one blank line or line of punctuation a big deal? No, but they add up, and it's a convenient place for us to draw the line (no pun intended).

We're not out there scouring the forums for signature rule violators. If they get reported, we change them. If we notice them on our own, we change them. But we're not checking the sig on every single post we read to see if it is compliance.
 
WildCowboy said:
Both of your examples are fine...using underscores to indent text is not against the rules.

As you note, the INDENT tag adds in blank lines beyond the text included within the tags, and that's why we don't allow it. Same with the QUOTE tag. (Of course, now that you bring it up, I see that the rules about tags aren't included on the "Edit Signature" page...only in the Forum Rules. We should update that.)

We're just trying to keep the height of signatures to a minimum due to the fact that they appear under every single post and users have to scroll past them to read forum pages. And they can distract from post content by breaking up the thread of the conversation. Obviously we minimize that greatly just by disallowing images in sigs, but still, we like to encourage people to make wider sigs rather than tall, skinny ones to help even more with that.

Is one blank line or line of punctuation a big deal? No, but they add up, and it's a convenient place for us to draw the line (no pun intended).

We're not out there scouring the forums for signature rule violators. If they get reported, we change them. If we notice them on our own, we change them. But we're not checking the sig on every single post we read to see if it is compliance.
Click to expand...

I suppose that's fair enough. I've gotten used to centering the signature because I was worried the underscore was a no-no but I'm glad to know it's okay. Thanks for the info.
 
Of all the issues with this site now, signatures should be at the bottom of the list. I would much rather the mods focus 100% of their time cleaning up the trouble areas and then work on the minor infractions later. I thought code was put in to keep the signatures under control?
 
My opinion:

^ The problem with ignoring minor rules violations is that it creates a lack of respect for the rules in general. I think the answer lies in a combination of the following:

- Mods continue to moderate according to the rules as fairly as humanly possible, assisted by members who report problems.

- Threads like this come up when a rule is confusing (in which case the confusion will be cleared up by mods and/or admins answering), or when a rule change is suggested (in which case either a reason for not doing so should be given, or a mod/admin discussion follows, to see if a change is feasible/a good idea).

I don't think ignoring some rules in favor of others is a good idea.
 
WildCowboy said:
Shouldn't we be able to expect users to take some responsibility and read the rules for themselves...especially rules in bold an inch above where they're typing?
Click to expand...

Good question, but if you're going to apply the "we expect some common sense" rule to signatures, why not start enforcing it to new threads? I don't think I need to list specific examples. Certain thread subjects get brought up over and over again.

This also seems to contradict the logic that older members "should have" read the rules by now, and are therefore punished more severely for a first-time infraction as opposed to someone who just joined and breaks a rule. Why is "common sense" something that only longer-standing members are required to exercise?
 
annk said:
My opinion:

^ The problem with ignoring minor rules violations is that it creates a lack of respect for the rules in general. I think the answer lies in a combination of the following:

- Mods continue to moderate according to the rules as fairly as humanly possible, assisted by members who report problems.

- Threads like this come up when a rule is confusing (in which case the confusion will be cleared up by mods and/or admins answering), or when a rule change is suggested (in which case either a reason for not doing so should be given, or a mod/admin discussion follows, to see if a change is feasible/a good idea).

I don't think ignoring some rules in favor of others is a good idea.
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I am not advocating ignoring rules, but during times when there are blatant issues those should take precedence over minor infractions. Then when things cool down enforce the small stuff.
 
^ I understand what you're saying, but I disagree. I think inconsistencies in moderation are confusing and create misunderstandings about how the rules are enforced. Most of the objections to how moderation is done have been centered around just that - a lack of consistency, whether perceived or real. So adding to it is IMO not the answer.

We can't expect all members to understand why minor rules are sometimes seemingly ignored - and that's exactly how it would appear to those members who don't frequent the "problem" forums, like iPad and iPhone related forums. There are actually some who don't. ;)

Personally I think that if members really got acquainted with the rules, there would be many fewer problems. In this specific instance, as WildCowboy has pointed out, the signature rules are displayed each time a member edits his or her signature. The rule about blank lines and lines of punctuation is even in bold. There's also been brought up something that needs to be clarified in the rules - the rules about tags.

This type of thread is therefore great for clearing up both misunderstandings about the rules, and pointing out places they need to be improved. And sometimes things do get changed due to feedback!
 
Prof. said:
I still don't understand why I got an infraction. I was never (at least I don't remember) warned via PM that my sig "violated" the TOU.
Click to expand...
Infractions are reminders. This is explained in in the FAQ.

Infractions are generally less serious than PMed warnings. In fact, you could just as easily say "Why did I get a PM when I didn't get an infraction first?"

Most signature problems are by newbies who set their signature to something like this:
:apple: iMac
:apple: MacBook
:apple: wireless keyboard
:apple: iPhone 3G
:apple: iPod nano​
making everyone else scroll past their long signature. We change it to a single line and they usually never touch it again, or follow the rules the next time. The faster we do this the less likely it is that other newbies will see it and follow suit. Only in the exceptional case do we have to remind someone. In almost all cases it was an honest mistake; they simply never noticed the guidelines on the signature page.

If I can summarize what I see in this thread, there are a few complaints here:

1. Getting reminded about rules that you didn't know about or think are very minor. That's why you get only a reminder.

2. That infractions sound more serious than they are so the wording should make things clearer. Good suggestion.

3. That infractions stay visible in your profile (for those who look at their own profile), even though other users don't see your infractions. That's how vBulletin works. We acknowledge that this is a disadvantage.

4. That moderators use the semi-automated infraction system rather than take time to do the equivalent manually with Private Messages. Keep in mind that having moderators work as efficiently as possible benefits everyone, and that fairness in moderation requires that all the "paperwork" be done with every moderation action. Take a look around this forum and you'll see requests for more moderation of troublemakers that have shown up in increasing numbers. Efficiency helps!
 
^ I wish vBulletin had a way for mods/admins to send a PM and have it also copy to the recipient's user notes. Maybe via a ticking a box or a separate button or something. </random idea>
 
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