And what will become of him. Yea sometimes the restriction from a discipline will encourage greater interest and practice toward it, but were we, all of us, not once babies suckling on a teet which we could not understand? What if, heavens forbid, philosophy and even higher learning will now be a foe, an enemy, an opponent, a near divine manifestation of arrogance and rejection, symbolic of all that is wrong with this world? No one will know what may now never manifest. May fate guide thee.

I told Prishon that I thought he had posted a lot in only 9 days, and that quantity usually cuts into quality. That said, he wasn't a disruptive presence.

There have been bannings that made a lot more sense than this one.

Was there any attempt made at warning this person?

If not, there is something seriously wrong with the moderation on this site.

PS: Turns out he was warned, so fair is fair.

He fit the posting profile of the commonly banned folk, no surprise here.

He just should accept his banning. The guy obviously wants to agitate! "WOLLT IHN DEN TOTALEN KRIEG?"

References to that small mustached shouting man seem to enter internet discussions regularly...

Ways to ensure TPF immortality:
1. Change your thumbnail to an image of a bird.
2. ??????????

What profile is that? Was he a moonatic?

Yeah, if there was a way to throttle a poster, limiting the number of comments and topics per day to, say, 10 and 1, then he would've been ok. No worse than the worst posters on the forum. But he was trashing up the forum like TheMadFool on drugs.

In some ways, it seems a shame because he was full of ideas, and he probably just needed to slow down a bit, and reflect rather than just writing. He must have created about 25 threads in less than a week. He also seemed to be online almost all the time and I even wondered if he was more than one person, although in some ways I am sure that this idea is ridiculous. But, he was so prominent that it was affecting the entire dynamics of the site and his constant new threads was making other ones vanish from the front page very quickly.

Note that @Hanover did send him a message to ask him to change his ways, but the response was a bad one.

Yeah, if there was a way to throttle a poster, limiting the number of comments and topics per day to, say, 10 and 1, then he would've been ok. — SophistiCat

That's a good idea. There is a way. It's self-discipline. For instance, I never call upon the mods or admins to ban anyone. I just ban them myself. I have quite the list:

Synthesis, check;
3017amen, check;
Apollodorus, check;
TheMadFool, check;
Counterpunch, check;
Prishon, check;
baker, check.

As you can see, I banned Prishon already, and that was some time ago. I don't know who, if any of these people are still around because I didn't wait for the site to ban them. I just ignore them. I know people ignore me. That's cool.

I really like your idea so I may try to limit the number of comments and topics per day, to 10 and 1. That might be difficult but it also may force me to spend more time thinking about what is important to me, and then articulate it better. The difficulty will especially arise when I am asked questions. I always feel compelled to answer. That feeling itself might be a failing that self-limitation would help with.

I will take this under advisement and seriously consider it. Thank you for sharing. If I don't respond to questions, I don't intend to be rude. I may just be practicing restraint. Likewise if I seem to "fall off the radar."

Anyway, I do appreciate the presence of mods and admins, whether I agree with any specific decision or not.

I told Prishon that I thought he had posted a lot in only 9 days, and that quantity usually cuts into quality. That said, he wasn't a disruptive presence. — Bitter Crank

I was sensing manic phase. Did you get that?

Yeah, or some addition to his, um, intake. I still feel a bad though, because as he said himself, some of it -- and maybe all of it -- was just excitement to be here. Whatever it was, something switched off whatever self-control he had. In the Shoutbox he mentioned that he had been cautioned about his posting. I'd guess how he responded in PM to the mods was a little more revealing of his state of mind.

It still seems to me that the need to do something about someone like him is more a function of the forum software we use not supporting killfiles. Individual posters can ignore who they like, but the mods are right that it shouldn't be an expectation of participants here to have to do that. The site itself degrades. On the other hand, if filtering were possible, that policy could change and the mods wouldn't have to worry nearly so much about this sort of thing. Prishon is gone, at least in part, because of a technical limitation, and that's too bad.

Maybe there should just be a posts per day limit, but if it can't be automated, that too is a bunch more modding and an even swifter ban.

(Maybe @SophistiCat's plugin could be made official and @Michael could keep it working.)

Maybe he was manic. But maybe he has the sense to slow down. What was the actual reason? What was his reply to the mod? Was it that bad? — Waarzin

Interesting questions for a new member.
Let me ask you this: do you think he has the sense to slow down?

@Waarzin was one of Prishon's many reincarnations, by the way.

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I thought that the problem was that he wrote some posts which had some deeper discussions and some which were really shallow. To some extent, I think that we all write some posts which are better than others, but the way he was writing on so many threads and churning out new ones was probably affecting the whole dynamics of the site. The point at which I thought that this guy is likely to get banned was when he wrote a thread called, 'Is the mind like a marshmallow?'

@jamalrob I figured as such but thought I would try

@Jack Cummins
I agree with you on the affect site wide. In the last couple days it has given me pause if what I was contributing was even worth it as everything seemed jumbled.

Personally, my instinct was always to be harder on mean than on stupid; but there is a volume of anything that becomes spam, the same way that series 4 of anything becomes Neighbours.

Well that's just fine. Is this info stickied somewhere? (I could have missed it because I wasn't looking for it.)

Nope, just a custom thing I figured out after reading your comment.

Although @SophitiCat's extension does still work (for some reason I thought it was removed), and that's more user-friendly.

In closing, just to give some insight, Prishon was asked to slow down his posting, not only by the mods, but by other posters, and a good number of his posts had been deleted as had some of his threads, not just for sheer quantity but for quality. Prishon conducted years worth of postings in less than two weeks and received more modding in those two weeks than most receive in a lifetime. The modding was by multiple mods acting independently.

Instead of having to create a posting governor that automatically limits posting as some have suggested, a reduction and improvement in posting should be achievable by simply being asked. I know some have speculated other issues might have been at play with his mental state, but that's not really something any of us can assess remotely nor can we be excepted to provide special accommodation for it.

Graveltty was banned a couple of days ago. May we have some idea why? I thought he was contributing well on one thread, and on others I did not myself notice anything objectionable. Did he break a rule or cross a line?

Graveltty was banned a couple of days ago. May we have some idea why? I thought he was contributing well on one thread, and on others I did not myself notice anything objectionable. Did he break a rule or cross a line? — tim wood

I think he was another iteration of Marco, the Man With a Thousand Usernames.

So far as I know, everyone banned in the last few days was Marco.

I banned him for saying something to signal he was Marco.

Marco confided he has a masters in physics. With all the pseudo-scientific babble here about collapsing the wave function, superposition, entanglement, etc. I thought it worthwhile to have a genuine physicist on board. Kenosha Kid was excellent, but he hasn't been around for a couple of months. Lookin' for that Pot 'O Gold with his guitar probably.

I banned him for saying something to signal he was Marco. — fdrake

Except that he was great! Can you get him back or send me his email?