You guys are not gonna believe this man!! I was sent a pm from a member with part of the conversation that hroark had when he got pissed off and left. A mod went in to my pm box and removed the pm without asking me!!!! Wtf is going on here !!!~!!!??????????????????????????
You guys are not gonna believe this man!! I was sent a pm from a member with part of the conversation that hroark had when he got pissed off and left. A mod went in to my pm box and removed the pm without asking me!!!! Wtf is going on here !!!~!!!??????????????????????????
I was told that the forums are privately run. They have the right to do that when a situation arises and they feel it is necessary because of a problem.
Same happen here.......... message got deleted right out of the Inbox..... ( PS: I couldn't reply either )
This is going wayyyyyyy too far...... first violations of "Freedom of Speech".......... Now Private Mail get censored and/or deleted........
Well, seems like "someone" is on a powertrip........
PS: Privately run or not.......... This is a FREE country and EVERYONE has to accept "Freedom of Speech"......... Can you imaging, all what Romney says about Obama and what Obama says about Romney gets censored on CNN.COM ????????? But that's exactly what's happen here........
It is what it is people. I won't come here to hang out and chat any longer....... you can best believe that. Also, if any of you have something PRIVATE that you would like to share with me, send me your email, phone, or another way to get in contact with you. If I can call Android Forums new members to help them out with their phone problems, I can sure as hell call you to discuss private matters. Lol. Many of you have my phone number or email. Please use it from now on to discuss personal matters. Thanks.
It is what it is people. I won't come here to hang out and chat any longer....... you can best believe that. Also, if any of you have something PRIVATE that you would like to share with me, send me your email, phone, or another way to get in contact with you. If I can call Android Forums new members to help them out with their phone problems, I can sure as hell call you to discuss private matters. Lol. Many of you have my phone number or email. Please use it from now on to discuss personal matters. Thanks.
Rather than going on some "this site is terrible how dare they violate us" witch hunt, how about we take a step back and think about this.
First, I guess let me remind everyone of the terms all users agree to when they register on this site. If no one reads agreements, or at least skims them, on sites they join - let me take this time to suggest everyone start doing that from now on. Here are a couple of snippets from the agreement which everyone here has agreed to. None of this is new, been in place for quite a long while now:
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"Anything you post within this system becomes the property of Android Forums and the administrative staff. This includes regular posts as well as Social Group postings (public and private) and the private messaging system."
and
"You agree to review the following additional guidelines before posting and know that anything you put into the system can be read by the administrative staff and becomes the property of Android Forums."
and
"You agree that the administrative staff of Android Forums reserve the right to remove, edit, move or close any thread, private message, forum, social group, or any other aspect of the site for any reason we see fit. You agree that the administrative staff has the right disable, ban, delete, or modify user accounts for any reason."
==================
Now, with that said - of course we don't just have a habit of going into our private message system and reading what is going on with everyone's personal lives. Surely no one would expect we even have the time for that sort of thing. But of course we CAN and sometimes need to. Would anyone really expect we don't have access to our own database, and at times need to take care of unwanted stuff put into this system or need to to investigate various situations? (Like classifieds transactions gone wrong with claims filed with PayPal, for example)
(At this point let me also say - no moderators or Guides have access to the database, only Admin)
The "freedom of speech" argument - well, I'm all for freedom of speech but I really hate when people claim that has been violated. I'm not sure sometimes that the purpose of that, the idea behind it, is really understood. Freedom of speech has to be limited in some regard with some aspects. Otherwise we'd be riddled with spam/porn/hate posts that we delete regularly, as well as lots and lots of little pointless arguments. People would be able to yell fire in crowded places, scream in libraries all day, and walk around playgrounds screaming what they would like to do to children. It's a pretty poor argument, often times.
Now. To address this particular scenario.
When a user is banned from AF they are banned. Period. That isn't our way of saying "Please join back up under a different name and go about continuing to trash the site."
This particular user wanted to get banned. That was clear. Once they got what they wanted and got disabled they created more accounts likely to continue to trash the forum with inappropriate pictures and foul language. One of these accounts was sending private messages, too, and this came to the attention of staff.
So, in light of what they had already known to be sent in PM, and what was being put on threads, they asked after banning the member that I remove whatever was in the sent box on that account. They didn't know what was in the sent box, but knew stuff was there.
All things considered, I agreed and did just that. I don't know what was there either. Just performed a one click "delete sent box messages" action and called it a day.
Now, I am not thrilled about this whole thing. All this stems from basically asking someone to stop publicly trashing people they suspected weren't as skilled as they might suggest and instead work with staff to identify these people and let us do our jobs and handle them ourselves if needed. It is not our fault this user didn't want to act within the scope of the rules. It is not our fault they decided they wanted to "leave" AF, and force their account to get banned/disabled.
It is not our fault they decided to then sign back up and cause further trouble.
This happens, though. And every so often I make the choice to clear out sent boxes of accounts that are obviously here to cause trouble. This is for the protection of users. It's not always viewed that way, but that's life and we can never please everyone - and I'm fine with standing behind what we do. This is by no means an easy community to run, no community like this is. With 1000 registrations a day and 15k people on at any given time, members might expect some amount of drama. We do our best to handle it all as fairly as we can, and pride ourselves in that.
NO situation is resolved with 100% satisfaction to EVERYONE involved.
Are there times we need to learn from situations and tweak how we do things in the future? Sure, of course. We're human here at Androidforums, we have no bots on staff. And we do just that. Was there room for improvement with the way this entire case was handled from the very very start to the very very finish? Of course there was. And the lead mod in this case and I talked about it and identified what could have gone better if some things were handled slightly different.
The mods could have done one or two things differently, and I could have actually read the PMs and verified whether or not any were harmful or abusive and if fine left intact. That's something I get to think about and possibly adjust accordingly in the future. However, we were dealing with this trouble user as well as another separate case of ("eeeevil") shenanigans that was happening simultaneously - so we did what we could, and did what we did, and that's that.
None of what we could have done differently, though, would have prevented the root of the problem from still happening or was major enough to excuse them from their actions so I'm not going to reverse anything. (From what the user states, reversing wouldn't matter anyway. He's calling for the firing of the lead mod (in this case) "in order to come back" and.. well.. that is simply ridiculous.) It could have just gone smoother.
Everyone here is expected to co-exist under the same set of rules. No one here is exempt from them or any more special than anyone else, no matter how good they are at what they do and how bad they perceive others to be.
I will say though - people need to remember - this IS a privately run site. This IS our site to run as we see fit. It is a free site that is ad supported, we ask nothing from our members but what is in the rules all members agree to. We're not required to explain ourselves or our decisions either - but sometimes we like to.
I hope this helps. I'm not trying to debate this so while I am going to put this thread back into view I'm not currently going to leave it open for discussion. Hopefully people take that for what it is and not make various assumptions on what it "means". I have a lot to do right now and can't really try to keep up with monitoring this thread when, as far as I'm concerned - this is a closed case.
Thanks all. You are of course welcome to PM me with any thoughts, I will get to them as soon as I can.
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