Forum related question

Gad

Which brings another question: what if the IP address is blocked?

Evo

That blocks them if they have a static IP.

rbj

so who polices the police here?

micromass

All mentor action can be seen and reviewed by other mentors. So if one mentor does something wrong, then the other mentors will correct him.
In particular, Greg sees everything we do and can correct us if necessary. Complaints can always be sent to other mentors or Greg.

So we are policed by the other mentors. And if necessary, we are policed by Greg.

And who polices Greg?? Nobody needs to, because it's his forum.

D H

There's a hierarchy amongst us police, mentors < admins < Greg. A rogue mentor can be removed by an admin or Greg, a rogue admin can be removed by Greg. A rogue Greg? Well, it's his site.

We do not act unilaterally except in the most obvious of cases: Spammers, hackers, sockpuppets of previously banned members, the most obvious of cranks, and people who post or PM the most incredibly vile/vulgar/threatening garbage. Otherwise we work to a consensus before taking action. In general, the more extreme the action (banning someone is most extreme), the more we look for consensus.

tiny-tim

Greg'sDad ?

Evo

Actually, the mentors and "admins" are the same, admins are not above mentors, Admins can approve passwords, reboot the server, and ban specific IP addresses. Aside from this they are the same as mentors. The hierarchy is mentors/admins < Greg. Greg is the only one that can overide a mentor/admin.

The admins just have the ability to do some of the technical stuff so that we don't have to try to reach Greg every time we need something done.

Micro is correct, the mentors (this includes admins) do a good job of policing ourselves. Greg is the Police Chief.

DragonPetter

I only asked because someone who is respected in the physics field (no, I will not reveal the identity) and who is also very helpful on this forum may have received a ban, and I was hoping it was a mistake.

Evo

I'm not aware of anyone like that being banned. Can you hit the report button and tell us the name you are concerned about? The report only goes to the mentors and perhaps we can privately answer your question.

Pranav-Arora

I too have one question. Even if some members are banned, why they are shown in the "Active users" list on the home page?

Also, a few days ago, my IP was banned for a few hours, i even sent a message regarding this and this happened twice. I did not receive any reply too.

Evo

Even though they were banned, they're still lurking.

A few days days ago, the server was down for a couple of hours and no one could get in. You have no bans on your record.

Pranav-Arora

Oh maybe but I was greeted with a message "Sorry, the administrator has banned your IP address. Click here to send a message.".

Borek

Then could be you are assigned IP dynamically and you happened to be assign an IP that was earlier used by a banned spammer.

Astronuc

Sorry about that!

That is the case.

Some ISPs are used by a lot of spammers. We try to block the spammers without disrupting access of legitimate members. And sometimes, members are assigned IP addresses that we have blocked because of spammers.

DragonPetter

I hit the report button last week, but never got any feedback. Did mods receive my report or should I not expect a reply from someone about my report? The user of whom I was concerned about still appears to be banned.