Meta-PokéBase Q&A
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Hear me out for a hot sec,

We all know the users who post the low quality questions that often break the rules from being opinion-based to being just... dumb.

Is it possible to have it be a bannable or punishable offence if users refuse to contribute any useful information to the site, and refuse to accept any criticism on how to improve, especially if other users have offered?

Obviously, not overly important but some users really get me grinding my teeth. Would be cool to hear staff's view on this matter.

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Alternate title: ban all dumb little kids immediately

/j
I can say that from past experience, users who make exceptionally bad posts have been banned. It's not the type of stuff we want here. Really, users can be banned for any reason that mods want. I know there have been instances that "this person is annoying and makes garbage posts consistently" has been the reason for multiple users getting banned.
What was the most recent example of this happening?
It was a long time ago, if I have any free time later I'll scroll through staff discord and see when exactly,  but I can confirm this definitely has happened.

Actually I want to ask, what do you mean by not contributing? There's nothing wrong with not posting much at all, and just using the chat for example.

That being said, we try to avoid this reasoning if possible,  as it makes it harder to try to remove biases from the decision (if someone says a very bad thing,  its obvious that they should be banned, but what counts as low quality?).
I feel that needs to become much more specified.  What qualifies as "not contributing" to the website.  Would not selecting BA's count if it is done repeatedly?  What about posting bad answers?  How specific do we get on what is/is not contributing to the site?  I feel that this is a good idea in theory, but like PX said, it gets too subjective for me to agree with this unless it gets way more specified.  I admit there is some things that are bannable such as constant necroposting and saying very bad things, but there is a lot that needs to happen for this to get any further in my opinion at least.
By not contributing I mean like, really really bad answers that sum up to “I think” or “idk”, necroposting, irrelevant comments or answers in threads, etc

Ofc this wouldn’t apply to people just using chat but like,,,, u know
How about instead of "not contributing" its "only contributing low effort content"
good idea
x correcting my bad grammar i didn't know i had

in my defense i wrote that on my new phone ok

1 Answer

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Best answer

Is it possible to have it be a bannable or punishable offence if users refuse to contribute any useful information to the site, and refuse to accept any criticism on how to improve, especially if other users have offered?

I don't believe this in particular should be bannable. I don't want people messaging us saying, "This person isn't listening to me, can you tell them off thanks?"

You don't always have to accept criticism and not everyone agrees on what content is useful.

With that said, it's very reasonable for us to talk to people for not following basic forum etiquette -- "stay on topic", "do your research", etc. We have definitely banned people before for posting garbage comments over and over while never responding to messages from us about that. (The key is people who don't respond to us. We will try very hard to make you notice our messages and hopefully act upon them before we ban you for something like this.)

As far as "low effort" questions go, e.g. issues that very clearly could be solved with google, hopefully closing them over and over is enough of a deterrent. I have some sgt threads to finish writing that might help with this too (and I'd put some stuff in the rules list as well if I had my way).

The short (but unhelpful) answer is we will always respond when we think there is a problem. If we think somebody's posts are a disturbance to the community, then of course we are going to talk to that person. There are people we've banned that you would never have heard from, because we removed literally everything they posted. We're definitely trying to keep a standard for content here.

I'll quickly add something, because I know one person in particular is on people's minds right now: I personally will not demand people to select answers to their questions if they don't want to. If you answer somebody's question, they don't select it and never tell you why, that's tough. It's their choice. You are not owed the 20 points.

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