Ban the crime and not the criminal! I have been a firm believer of this ideology for a long time. Thus, before coming to the question, that whether MS is justified in banning its members or not, I’d like to know that why such circumstances arrive in which a member has to be banned.
Firstly, it’s very easy for all of us to talk about banning here, when we ourselves haven’t been banned! Imagine, how will you feel, if you try to login tomorrow and fail to do so, since you have been banned! Try to understand the mental agony. Banning a member from a public forum is like boycotting a human being from our society. Whatever, the reason of the ban may be, yet this step can completely shatter that person’s confidence & self esteem.
And thus, banning a member may bring more harmful results rather than fruitful ones. This step may make the website dirtier rather than cleaner, since the banned member may create duplicate ids and start littering at MS (unless MS starts to charge for each id) with the motive of taking revenge. Thus, I believe that rather than banning a member, MS should try and ban the reasons for which members are banned!
Let’s have a look at the common reasons for banning members from MS –
1. Irrelevant and obscene reviews / Provocative Reviews
If a member is writing irrelevant and obscene reviews, keep deleting his reviews. There will come a point of time, that eventually he’ll stop writing such reviews, after knowing that all his hard work is going futile! But the reviews must be deleted quickly. There is no point of deleting the review, after it has been read by almost 200 persons.
2. Plagiarism and third party copyright violation
I think it’s a serious and utterly stupid crime. Why would a member want to copy something? Doesn’t he have a mind of his own or views of his own? Rather than banning such members, they should be made ashamed of themselves. Just like we have a “star writer” category and “hall of fame” category, we can have a “copycat” category for them, and place their id and picture there. Even the thought of such a horrid treatment, would stop the members from copying something.
3. Member harassment and abusive m2ms
If a member abuses a fellow member publicly, it will tarnish his own reputation and he’ll lose all the respect, which he had in the eyes of the others. And as far as abusive m2ms are concerned, I wonder what’s the use of distrust list. Is it there just for a show off? If we add a member to our distrust list, it should serve the same purpose, which the “ignore” button serves in Yahoo. That particular member should be banned from sending us any mails, or from accessing our profile page and reviews, once we add him/her to our distrust list.
4. Violation of TOS
Whenever we write a review at MS, we lose all the right of the ownership of that review and it becomes a property of the MS team. Thus, if we publish our review at some other place, that’s called violation of TOS, and your account, may be banned. MS was a pay site earlier and the writers used to get some bucks for writing here. Under those conditions, I feel it was okay if they kept right of ownership of reviews with them, since they were paying for it. But now since they are not paying for it, I don’t think it’s the right thing to impose such strict conditions on the writers. Writing a review requires a lot of hard work, and the writer deserves the credit for his work. So, either they should start paying again & if they can’t they should at least remove this strict condition. Otherwise, if any member writes a masterpiece, he won’t ever post it at MS!
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By following these steps I’m sure the need to ban the members will certainly decrease, if not eliminate altogether. Now, coming to the question of what to do if a member has to be banned! I guess, the answer lies in mutual agreement.
By mutual agreement I mean, a member should be banned by the consent of both, the other members and also the MS management. MS management shouldn’t ban a member on its own without consulting the other members. Such a step may create a rebellion among the other members and kill the spirit of the community. Also, I feel before banning a member he should be given a chance to defend himself. He shouldn’t feel that he has been treated unfairly.
Now you may ask, how to get the consent of other members, since there are so many members here, that it would be impossible to get an opinion of all! For this purpose I suggest the concept of online elections. Just like in democracy, we choose our representatives; here too members may choose their representatives, who will serve as a link between the members and the management. Online polling can be done on a chosen date to choose the representatives and those who win the elections can have their stint for one year. All, the major decisions from thereon, including the banning of the members should be taken jointly by MS management and the member representatives.
Thus, as I said earlier, I don’t believe the solution lies in banning the members. The solution lies in banning the reasons for which the members are banned!
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Here are a few more suggestions for the improvement of MS –
1. Since not many people have access to the Internet thus the reviews written on MS can’t be read by all. So it won’t be a bad idea if MS starts a monthly magazine containing the best reviews from that month along with the comments. I’m sure it would be an instant hit, since the reviews written in other newspapers and magazines aren’t very honest. Thus, the readers will love to read true first hand experiences from common people like them. As a result, the magazine will be like a hen laying golden eggs for the MS management. They will earn huge profit (which is their main motive behind running this site) and we writers would also be very happy since nothing can be more satisfactory for a writer than his work being read by a larger group of people. It will increase the popularity of MS overnight and many others will join this site & start penning.
2. “Review of the day” can be selected from the previous day, rather than digging old graves and bringing out reviews written 2-3 years back. On 13th April 2005, the best review written on 12th April 2005 should be the “Review of the day”. It will motivate the writers to write better quality reviews and also they will be tempted to write a review every 24 hours.
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At the end of the day what matters is our love for this site. We are the biggest assets of MS and I’m sure this cat & mouse game will end very soon. Let’s contribute our two cents for the improvement of our online home!
© Tanmay Singh, 2005
