Staff abusing authority

[Cerberus_0408]

I'm not making any judgment calls here, I am not accusing admins or anybody else of abusing powers. I simply want to know your opinions on this.

When do you think a staff member has pushed the boundaries of power on a forum?

Is a disagreement grounds for a warning or banning?

What about idle threats to warn or ban a member in order to forced them into submission with their own beliefs?

What about deletion of your post and threads because they disagreed with what was posted?

Have you had experience with this? Were you ever accused of abusing your powers or a member who was a victim of an abusive staff?

Just to share my personal encounters, I have had an admin ban me in the past but Mad Jackyl said that he was in no position to judge nor is anybody on the forums the right person to judge. However, the staff on one other forum abused their powers as I mentioned when they changed my user name. So an admin has pushed the boundaries because they modified my profile for no reason whatsoever.

Another incident that happened to me was listed in my rants thread. I responded to a thread that was clearly saying the members on one other forum cyber bullied me when they made random paintings and posted them on the forum. When one other member did not like my drawings, he threatened to go on strike until the admins banned me. That in my opinion is a clear sign of disagreeing to the extent that staff had to punish me. Everybody makes mistakes and evidently I was doing something wrong but even that is no basis for any arguments that banning is a suitable punishment for a minor offense like making random cartoons.

The other thing I'd like to add is that one other member on that forum made a thread about me being different from others and I tried to justify this with the fact that people in different parts of the world are not the same. One of the admins said that cultural differences were out of the question, but what I forebore to add was the fact that three members on the board jettisoned their membership permanently and did not explain why they did this.

Please answer the questions as listed above so that I can gather opinions.

[cernex]

When do you think a staff member has pushed the boundaries of power on a forum?

When they get addicted to banhammering people for having different opinions or by not laughing at bad jokes they feel are hilarious.

Is a disagreement grounds for a warning or banning?

Depends if the argument in question gets offensive (like, dissing the admin) or doesn't... also depends who starts dissing to begin with.

What about idle threats to warn or ban a member in order to forced them into submission with their own beliefs?

To put it simple: THAT'S WRONG.

What about deletion of your post and threads because they disagreed with what was posted?

Depends: disagreeing about a game or political matter is not the same to disagreeing about the admin's virginity, to put an example.

Have you had experience with this? Were you ever accused of abusing your powers or a member who was a victim of an abusive staff?

Yes. On some Resident Evil fansite which's name currently escapes me, a lot of my posts got deleted because I gave the PS3 lots of flack way back when it hadn't appear yet (mind you, I still do... and I OWN one). I eventually had enough, called it enough, packed my things, and left.

[Cerberus_0408]

Ah, there we go. It seems your views are almost the same as mine.