The site is how you are 99% sure it is. The site isn't a playground for you to do whatever you want and it isn't a place for you to come and get some entertainment out of it. It is primarily a forum for solving computer problems. Meeting Spot was placed there to allow some community interaction and be a bit less serious than the rest of the site.

Threads and posts will get deleted without notice. When you signed up you saw that announcement. There really isn't anything you can do about it, it is our discretion. If you don't like it, go find somewhere else. I've been involved with a few boards covering a wide range of topics, and the mods here at Techspot are among the most fair and leinent I've encountered.

I've seen this happen before, someone gets banned, then one of the other guys that also was on thin ice notices it and makes a thread complaining. You have been creating worthless threads seemingly for your entertainment and were asked to stop. Now you are trying to rally support behind yourself and create some kind of social uprising. Well it isn't going to work. Because at the end of the day Julio trusts his moderators, most of us have been doing it for several years, and your little dispute on how things are run is not going to change anything.

As most of you should be aware of, a long time ago we wrote some guidelines on how to remain in good standing here on the TechSpot forums. Those haven't changed much over the years and in general are very basic principles of what is accepted and what is not, how we expect members to be respectful to each other, and how we like to keep things tidy and organized around here.

SNGX is correct in that we can not let members do away with whatever they please. This is not an off-topic, generalized social networking environment, but a more controlled technology oriented website where ease of information, interaction, and help & support should be prioritized.

I don't have complete details on how these two members got banned, but I can say our team of moderators really go the extra mile in discussing and debating what actions are to be taken, 95% of the time decisions are not deliberate and that is a lot more than I could ask for.

If you feel you have been subject to abuse from our mod team you can always reach me and I will try to investigate the issue, but keep in mind my time is limited and sometimes I've found myself to be more strict than mods themselves.


As a side note... you will find many many different kinds of forums around the net, some better moderated than others. I'm proud to say TechSpot has one of the nicest community environments you will find in the Tech category and all you have to do is follow some basic rules that for some will come as plain common sense.

Fair enough. All forums are different and their admins and mods run them in the way they best see fit. However, another forum in which I am a member, a gaming oriented forum, posts suspensions and bans with a brief description of the reason for the ban and sometimes a link to the offending item. No additional posts or comments by other members are allowed.

It serves to let other members know their limits and what the consequences of exceeding those limits. Of course, all forums have guidelines but many do not read them. One of the benefits of the public bannings and suspensions is to remind members what the guidelines are and why they should read them. Another benefit is that it shows the bannings and suspensions were not capricious or unfair.

Of course, just because another forum does something does not mean this one should necessarily do the same. I realize how other forums are run has no bearing on how this one is run. Anyway, just another viewpoint on this issue.

I thought about that for a sec mailpup. I think that approach does have some value, but I think it is too harsh for the benefit it would have here. We ban very few people here, it is actually extremely rare. I think (outside of spammers) we've banned 3 guys in the last month or 2, which is more than I can remember in the past year. It is such an uncommon occurance, I don't think it is fair to the person that got banned to have their reason paraded in front of the forum.

SNGX1275, I see what you are saying and it is reasonable, especially for these forums. In the other forum I referred to, as a gaming oriented one, it has a fairly high proportion of younger members. Still, it is a very tightly run forum with a low (no) tolerance for ranting, spamming, warez and otherwise nonproductive posts, not that these forums are much different in this respect. However, in the other forum there are a fair number of suspensions and bannings. That forum probably needs the public flogging deterrent factor much more than here.