#14 Infractions

El Héroe Oscuro

El Héroe Oscuro

IG: elheroeoscuro
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    Question Of The Day #14: Have you received an infraction before?
    PokeCommunity, while an extraordinary site to go on, like other sites, is bound to rules or moral obligations to oblige to. The reason being that order and enforcement of said rules will create a balance of stability within the site. As a result, whenever rules are broken, infractions are given out to individuals depending on the severity of the mistake in an attempt to have behavior corrected. So my question for you is have you ever received an infraction? What was the infraction for? Do you think that the system of infractions is fair? Do you think that some rules are just downright outrageous to give infractions towards?

    I've received two infractions for my tenure here on PC, both associated with my trade center I had made in 2009. As an ignorant 15 year old, I could never tell whether or not a Pokemon was hacked or not so I just went with my gut feeling. As a result, I got slapped with 2 infractions for giving out hacked Pokemon and I actually almost accumulated enough points to get me suspended from the site. It's funny how things come full circle and now I'm the one doing the judging hm?

    Don't feel hesitant to talk about past infractions if you've received any; this is a judge-free zone. And as always, feel free to discuss all entities of this discussion below.​
     
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    I had some pretty stupid infractions during my "noob" days here at PC. One of which I recall was "disrespectful to others" which I got for something I didn't even think was disrespectful, but I think the one who gave it out interpreted it as that so yeah... but then again it's all up to discretion. There was also one where I was slapped for having an avatar too similar to another user (which I think was dumb imo), and it was the same staff member who whacked the "disrespect" one too.

    I was even suspended from the forums in mid 2011 (the typical two-week ban fyi), for something I could not even recall. But yeah my situations were pretty outrageous ones that I think wouldn't even warrant such a punishment. Said staff member who I feared at the time has retired from his position since, and I have not gotten any more infractions since late 2012 so I guess you can say I finally recovered from my stupidness.

    But also, I know there were some pretty rough mods back then (and of course mod power abuse was what led to me quitting my first forum). Nowadays the staff team I'm seeing currently is more lenient and also I have learned from my dreadful mistakes.

    I also once thought that getting infractions lowered your chances of becoming staff but I think I can say that is totally false.
     
    I haven't gotten an infraction before, but I'll say one thing; I don't think giving infractions should be the 'go-to' method for disciplining members, and yes, sometimes I feel that infractions are handed out way too easily at times. Personally, I don't like giving out infractions unless it's perfectly necessary because I personally just like to sit down with a member if they have a problem and work something out before the situation escalates. @__@ Not to say I won't auto-ban adbots or anything, but, again, I just like to be more lenient with these sorts of things.

    Some staff may think differently, but this is just how I roll~
     
    Thankfully, none. I've been on the bad side of people on other forums like Smogon way back but i'm not as stupid now. I have not been infracted for anything here. So yeah, nothing else to say aside from that =)
     
    No infractions! I think the panic about infractions on PC is really bad, and is contributed to by the fact that a lot of mods think like Dragon and don't give them out for warnings; a warning is really an infraction and an infraction is even worse than that, when you have a warning for the warning. Then a yellow card doesn't translate into the warning it's supposed to be, but instead it means "I warned you and you didn't listen so here's a permanent record-style symbol of your disobedience." Then people get understandably upset when they get them because they've become more serious than warnings.

    Of course, not like I gave them out that often as a mod either; this culture was already a thing and I contributed to it because it's so much easier. If you're the one staff member that gives out warnings as actual warnings and not as punishments, then members think you're harsh and staff who look at the profile of the member you warned interpret it differently ("they must have done something really bad to go beyond a verbal warning into yellow card territory"). So definitely not criticizing Dragon for that, but I think it's a culture shift that would be nice on PC because having a system to show what kinds of warnings people have gotten would be really nice and since mods only tend to use yellow cards after verbal warnings (which are invisible to all other staff), there's less transparency and things get confusing.

    e: I know this post is already long, but I thought about a great analogy - my high schools and lateness/detention. My first high school had a policy that's much like the verbal warning system we have now. After a few times being late to one teacher's class, you'd get a detention. Teachers didn't write down who was late, so as long as you limited it to once a month per class (or slightly more often even), you could get away with ridiculous amounts of lateness. In my second high school, they had a demerit system. Every time you were late, you got a demerit, which was recorded in your file. Once you hit 10 demerits, you got a detention. Needless to say, people were late far less often in my second school because you couldn't get away with what you could in the first school. The one demerit wasn't particularly grave, because as long as you weren't a chronic lateness person you wouldn't make it up to 10 in one year, but it was a record of what happened.
     
    Oryx said:
    Of course, not like I gave them out that often as a mod either; this culture was already a thing and I contributed to it because it's so much easier. If you're the one staff member that gives out warnings as actual warnings and not as punishments, then members think you're harsh and staff who look at the profile of the member you warned interpret it differently ("they must have done something really bad to go beyond a verbal warning into yellow card territory"). So definitely not criticizing Dragon for that, but I think it's a culture shift that would be nice on PC because having a system to show what kinds of warnings people have gotten would be really nice and since mods only tend to use yellow cards after verbal warnings (which are invisible to all other staff), there's less transparency and things get confusing.
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    So would you say that one of the biggest underlying issues with giving out infractions is that it's pretty inconsistent on how and when it's given out by staff members?
     
    I have been infracted for being far too sexy. Plus thread revival. But mostly dat sex appeal.

    Back when I was a mod I took a very lax attitude to infractions with the majority of members as you can usually tell if someone will stop breaking the rules through a friendly verbal warning or not, but occasionally infractions did have to be given and in a fair amount of cases it stopped the members from posting in the section altogether. Not sure why people view them so highly but it's always interesting seeing how different people react to this kinda thing.
     
    elheroeoscuro said:
    So would you say that one of the biggest underlying issues with giving out infractions is that it's pretty inconsistent on how and when it's given out by staff members?
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    I think that's probably too generalized to be what I'm talking about. I think on the staff side, the culture is pretty homogeneous, so most infractions given out are for things that 90% of the staff would agree with. It's just that I think the culture should be slightly different is all, but any one mod trying to break the mold would end up confusing all the rest of the staff and end up not looking as good, haha.
     
    I don't believe I've been infracted on PC, but I've been pretty inactive here, soo. On another site, however, someone said something extremely rude about my fiancé, so I told him to **** off. I got infracted for that, though nothing happened to him for what he said, which was far more inappropriate. x:
     
    I have received not an infraction, but a single warning before for SPAM. Well, it wasn't exactly SPAM as in posting stupid things that don't relate to the topic at all (I'm not and never was that sort of person!). It was more of something along the lines of "I don't relate to the current topic right now so I have nothing much to contribute lol" in General Chat's DCC a long time ago and got warned for that because it was my first time committing an offence. I was still quite new and was not fully aware of the rules yet.
    No other warnings or infractions after that.
     
    I haven't received any actual warnings/infractions, which is honestly a bit surprising, since I did revive quite a few threads around the time when I joined, so I'm definitely not innocent haha. But I believe that's the closest I've been to getting infractions.

    As a moderator, I never actually gave out any red cards, and I only gave out very few yellows. Main reason being that simply PM'ing the people who broke the rules reminding them that doing ___ was against the rules was enough to make them stop. I occasionally gave out a yellow card if they after several verbal warnings didn't listen, but that was definitely rare. As for with actual infractions, I never thought of them as necessary for people who weren't intentionally breaking the rules (bar cases like content theft), since I don't believe people should be banned unless they're actually trying to make the experience worse for others. But yeah, that's just my view on it :p
     
    Nope, clean record on PC. The last official warning/infraction I remember getting on forums overall was for having a signature 10 pixels above the height limit 3-4 years ago.. and that I didn't even feel warranted any permanent documentation on my record, paha. I mean 10 pixels whoaaaa.

    As a moderator, I never actually gave out any red cards, and I only gave out very few yellows. Main reason being that simply PM'ing the people who broke the rules reminding them that doing ___ was against the rules was enough to make them stop. I occasionally gave out a yellow card if they after several verbal warnings didn't listen, but that was definitely rare.
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    Similar to how it is for me too as a staff member. PMing was enough for members to stop breaking rules and I've even met a few friends this way! Jumping on them with official warnings/infractions, while useful in some cases when staff need to look at infractions history, isn't the best way to help anyone settle in. I know I'd probably have left the forum quickly as a new member if I made an honest/silly mistake that earned me an infraction.
     
    I've received 5 infractions, but that's spanning since 2008 which is about 6 years so it's not that bad. My last was in 2012 but since then I haven't received any.
     
    I received a yellow card one time, but it was reversed quickly. I was falsely warned for character bypass, and at the time I had no idea that a warning was actually not really an infraction (since PC is the first forum I came to where infractions exist as the warning system and not like a percentage warning).

    As a mod, I dislike issuing infractions and warnings. However, I do hand them out when I need to. I was probably a little too strict when I first became a staff member and issued my first few infractions within under a month as a mod, but I've lessened up over time and resorted to just sending users PMs about their actions. Not once have I seen a same member break a rule in my section again ever since I began resorting to sending PMs to users without an official yellow/red card.
     
    It seems - at least to me - that each staff member varies when it comes to handing out infractions. Do you guys think that's a good thing, or do you believe that it should be constant across the board?
     
    Ugh, I hate handing out infractions. The whole thing and, as Oryx put it, the culture of warnings/infractions is something that I find somewhat upsetting. I realize it's probably the best and most functional system to discipline unruly members, but that doesn't mean I have to necessarily like the system. I try to reserve infractions for the people who really do wrong against the forum. Otherwise a simple PM is usually enough to remedy any miscommunication that may have happened.

    In the future, I'd like to see a way for members to expunge warnings, since we have a tendency to treat warnings like infractions anyway. Serious offenses are one thing, but I think decade old warnings are something that can be, and should be, appealed on a case by case basis. I know they're hidden from other members and they expire, but it's the principle of the matter.

    Eh, I dunno, it's late I'm sick don't mind me~
     
    I know that for the staff members, it's never fun when you have to hand out the infractions. In fact if I was in their position I'd likely just start off by PM'ing the rule-breaking member about their actions and what they did wrong, sorta like what Zach said in his post.

    If the member does continue to break the rules, I may send a warning and then if they do it again then I would resort to an infraction. In the event if I did become a staff member I want to be one who's lenient and not too harsh on the rule-breakers.
     
    In my first year here I was a young teenager. I didn't know the rules nor did I even take time to read any of the rules. It lead to me doing things I didn't mean to, As well as getting into a few arguments and getting a lot of infractions. I got enough fractions my first year here that I think I was banned for a month. Since that ban I had not got a infraction in over 3 going on 4 years until this week. I am really upset about this in fact. I didn't even get a chance to talk my case over, I just had a infraction swung at me and now I have a 4 point infraction for the rest of my life on PC. This will hurt me the rest of my life and most likely will stop me from completing my long goal of one day becoming a moderator. I really still don't think its fair. I even tried to take it up with other staff and none of them will even respond to me. So this means if I am still at PC 10 years from now I will always have that black mark of a 4 point infraction on my account. I honestly think some staff just throw out infractions without even hearing people out.
     
    ★Symbiosis★ said:
    This will hurt me the rest of my life and most likely will stop me from completing my long goal of one day becoming a moderator.
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    I can pretty much tell that theory is false, because I remember we had some staff members who still managed to reach their spot despite getting infractions in the past. I once thought the same thing myself when I was younger and still in my "noob" days, but now as I learned it really doesn't lower one's chance of becoming a mod. I had a massive turnaround in the last year or so compared to 2011-12 where I was really stupid and once even considered leaving the forums.

    So basically I went from someone who was confused and often acted stupid to now being looked up to by newer members and lending a hand when the situation calls. My story there can pretty much prove anyone can do it.
     
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