It is bewildering to me that a user on this forum can, prompted by nothing but the sight of a user that he hates, fly into such vicious personal attacks on another user and be met with primarily the thought that he should just be warned. Even though, for years, he's received warning after warning, slap on the wrist after slap on the wrist, several demotions and a ban, and has shown no signs of ever improving at all within that span of time.
Weekly is treated poorly, yes. A lot of users have it out for him, and will target and **** with him when he's done nothing wrong, because he's seen as an acceptable target. People will clamor for any chance to pick a fight and harangue Weekly and Weekly alone over shit they wouldn't bat an eye over with anyone else. It's happening right now on another thread, even. This is bad and things should be done about it, because even if Weekly isn't around, this sort of mindset will result in other users being targeted and harassed. It's unacceptable, and I don't think the people who participate in it so eagerly should be staff. We - well, you, I guess - should be better than that.
None of this changes the fact that Weekly's own behavior generally ranges from 'fine' to 'terrible'. He's already been banned for a year before - this isn't some unprecedented behavior. It's completely unacceptable, and the fact that somehow the wiki has reached the point where nobody even has the balls to suggest anything harsher than two weeks for something that would've had a new user out of the door for a month at least is utterly insane to me. Weekly's done a lot, yes, and he's had to deal with a lot of shit, yes. I still think he should suffer actual consequences for this.
Has some unfathomable change occurred since I retired? Is claiming that someone's IQ is lower than their shoe size, and then going on to describe them as one of the most vile, vicious, and hateful people you know now just something you'll just get a slap on the wrist for? What the **** do you need to do to get banned for just a month now? Threaten to murder someone? Christ.
I can sympathise with this. As I mentioned in my earlier post, I would suggest a punishment for Weekly in this matter, but I'm uncertain what punishment would be appropriate.
Simply put, my problem here is that I believe we should be dispensing punishments with strong regard to what our intended consequences of the punishment will be. I don't see the point in, say, banning a person for 6 months if we have full reason to believe they'll return at the end of the 6 months and start causing the exact same problems. In such a circumstance, we would have enacted a punishment with almost no positive consequences.
Obviously, there is a case to be made for punishments being enacted for purely punitive measures (to feel as though someone has received "just deserts"), and our means of rehabilitating problematic users are very much limited. But in this case, my ultimate problem is that Weekly's behaviour is not just some absurd, irrational product of nothing - it's a direct consequence of his long-term poor treatment by the users of the wiki, and the feeling he possesses that he needs to be hostile and argumentative to defend himself from that treatment, resulting in treatment towards him only worsening and a vicious cycle.
By banning Weekly, what do we hope to accomplish? Once he's back, we'll see the exact same problems - we'll see people trying to **** with Weekly, and we'll see Weekly causing the same problems we see now. I don't see any way of truly producing better consequences without either addressing the way that Weekly is treated, or without addressing the way that Weekly responds to this treatment.
My purpose here isn't to downplay the problems that Weekly is causing. In fact, it's the opposite - what I want to do here is to acknowledge that these problems are serious enough that we want to prevent them from happening again in the future, and the fact that our natural approach to doing that clearly won't prevent the same problems later down the line.
Even if we conclude here that Weekly should be banned for this behaviour (which, frankly, I think is ultimately reasonable), I don't think we can
just leave it at that. That will distance Weekly from the community for a time, and no more good will come from it. I believe we need to start addressing the underlying problem by allowing for and mediating open communication with Weekly about this conduct, preferably including some of the members who have been in conflict with him and vice versa. I don't see any long-term solution here that doesn't address this vicious cycle.