The Cooler

TTony

There's been various discussion lately about "the cooler", how it works, why it's there, etc.  So ...

The cooler exists mainly to stop us having to ban people.  It's intended as a "yellow card" or a "sin bin" (depending on your sport of preference) or the equivalent of picking up points on your driving licence rather than losing it the first time you get caught speeding.

We - the modmin team - will usually try to discuss things with someone who might be heading for the cooler rather than just putting them in there without any prior warning or explanation, and a trip to the cooler requires majority agreement by the modmin team rather than a decision by any one modmin.

(The modmins are DigitalScream, Emp_Fab, Jalapeno, Monquixote, and TTony). 

We try even harder not to ban people, as a member can make a number of trips, for increasing durations, to the cooler before being banned.

1st trip = 1 week.

2nd trip = 2 weeks.

3rd trip = 4 weeks.

(4th trip = ban).

Whilst in the cooler, a member can't post anything on the forum.  But, they can log-in, they can read content, they still have full PM functionality and their userID is retained.  This is very different to what happens under a ban.

Consistent with the driving licence analogy, we "forget" cooler trips that were more than 12 months ago.  So, if you've already had 2 trips to the cooler, but your first trip was more than 12 months earlier, we forget the first trip if you get sent there again - ie a subsequent trip would be treated as "trip2 = 2 weeks", rather than trip3 (even though you've had 2 previous cooler periods).

A ban means that you lose your userID, and if you try to rejoin under a different userID, that too will be banned as soon as we spot it.  Anyone banned can appeal to the modmins after 3 months to request re-admittance, though we'd need there to be a very good explanation to justify an un-banning.

Some actions result in a straight ban, for example spamming and the use of dual identities where there is no reasonable and acceptable reason for so doing.

I'll open a new thread in OT for anyone wanting to comment on The Cooler.