It's nice of you to ask us, but it's your decision, not ours.
Here are the two schools of thought on it:
The "Good for business" school says that you should ban a person when he/she starts to cost you in terms of readership and lost sponsorship advertising. In other words, when the disruption starts hitting you in the pocketbook. If it increases targetted hits, it's good. If it decreases them, it's bad. As long asregulars keep posting, lurkers keep reading, and new people keep clicking through to your sponsors, everything is fine and dandy. When regulars start leaving, lurkers stop logging in, and sponsors threaten to stop advertising, then you have to put a stop to it. That's the philosophy that they have across the tracks at Rx, always have, probably always will. It's strictly a question of "is it good for business?" If a guy making disgusting posts increases their hits and doesn't drive anybody away, then they'll let him post. There's no honor, class, ethics, morals, or principles there. It's all about "What's good for business?"
The other school of thought is that you should do what's in the best interest of your lurkers, posters, and advertisers, equally. If a person posts false comments about a sportsbook, and those comments are likely to mislead somebody who doesn't know better into avoiding what every regular knows is a good book (example: Cascade) or posting up at what everybody knows is a bad one (example: English Sports Betting), then that person should probably be given ONE warning. If he/she doesn't heed that warning and continually posts about how, say, some sportsbook stiffed him out of $660, then that person should be at least suspended for a while. Third offense, and goodbye. Yes, they can get a new posting name, new ISP, anonymous proxy, insecure proxies. You and Fred (and Minnow and Grandfather) know all about those because you deal with them everyday. What the agenda-types can't do is hide their intentions. To spread their sermon, they have to open their cyber mouths, and once they do, they're gone again.
That's my 2c on it.  |