What are everyone's thresholds for banning someone? I know most people do a "strike" system but is there any time you would just forgo that because someone is just... So awful?
I personally think if someone is causing disruptions in the community, maybe not breaking rules but going into an active safe space and handing out passive aggressive remarks, but also just being rude to everyone. I say cut the loss, if they're harming the community's vibe. But I'd like to get more opinions about such things. It is always great to hear other ideas!
I don't do strike systems personally. I've legitimately banned two people that weren't spambots in two and a half years and only have written warnings to a couple more for one-off behavior. I prefer to just ask people to leave if vibe doesn't work out but the following behaviors are to the level where I think the staff team is actively choosing to make the site and community worse off if they allow it to continue for any length of time.
1) Suicide baiting. Anyone who is willing to threaten to do this in the face of any disagreement, usually trivial, is pathetic and they know what they're doing. It's not my job to be someone's therapist or crisis hotline on demand and anyone who tries to bully you or any of your members into being this for them shouldn't be in your community.
2) Completely ignoring other player boundaries/site rules on a consistent basis even after this is addressed clearly and directly to them in private. One of the bans outright admitted to never reading character profiles while simultaneously going out of their way to trash talk how unoriginal and derivative everyone's character concepts were. Ended up banning this person twice, because they changed their IP and rejoined months after the first ban. In both instances they completely ignored combat system in important moments to write in freeform about how their character curbstomped other PCs because they were so cool and experienced and gritty.
3) Not treating other people as people and instead as objects meant for their entertainment and their entertainment alone. Ever been harassed because you're not replying to someone instantly 24/7? Ever been told to rework your character so your OC can be a better romantic option for someone's super cool and suave OC without any prompting or discussion beforehand? Ever been asked to just axe site rules/systems/etc. to satisfy a guest? Ever received death threats/etc. for disagreeing with people over minor things? I have. This happens and I think this is the core reason why occasionally you encounter someone who will draw their line in the sand over something that seems extremely trivial and implode until banned. You and everyone else are play dolls who aren't following directions to people like this, and this viewpoint won't change because you're just faceless internet people who don't matter if they won't play the way this person wants.
4) Someone who is toxic and also has a bad IRL situation, and guilt trips people constantly about their IRL situation to make sure nobody challenges them. This never, ever ends. I try to be understanding due to IRL circumstances, but if your IRL circumstances have turned you into someone who is an extremely toxic person who will lash out and make worse the lives of everyone you interact with that's not my problem and using those IRL circumstances as a bludgeon to smash on anyone who disagrees with you is not something conducive to the long term health of any community.
The line there is that you as an admin need to be mature enough to differentiate #2/#3 from a legitimate disagreement. This hobby is filled with people who have no idea how to handle conflict in any sort of healthy way and will default to extremes over trivial things. It's not your job to talk them off a cliff every time someone OOC doesn't like their favorite genre of music or whatever, but identifying people who just have no idea how to interact with others and those that are actively malicious is sometimes hard and you have to decide whether to treat them differently if the outcome is the same. Either one works, and it's really sad when someone who you're positive isn't being actively malicious nevertheless has such a negative impact on the site due to their inability to interact with others in a healthy manner that you have to ask them to leave.
Not for a site, but for an example had a member of a TTRPG table recently express that he had no idea why Mineta from MHA got so much crap and that he felt that some people were giving his archetype too much shade. Other people responded their main issue with him was that he had no narrative purpose and there's nothing he could have done that other members of 1A could have done and his shtick was honestly really icky for 2021 and could have been excluded completely and made the story better. Guy got progressively angry and kept talking past people about how Jiraya was a pervert too and everybody liked him and it was unfair that Mineta got the same treatment until he just imploded because nobody else in the chat liked Mineta like he did.
I don't think it was malicious, I think the guy just had no idea how to interact with others in a healthy way and wanted to say that it made him upset when people didn't like a character he liked. Instead of saying that, he started a debate and got more and more angry that people weren't agreeing with him and kept continuing to argue past people by ignoring everything they said and instead debating to "Those People" who didn't give our hero Mineta his due. Anyways he left the game over it because he felt his point of view wasn't being supported enough after he successfully blew up a complete nonissue into the most important thing in his life for several hours as he argued with multiple people for those several hours straight. He was so invested in it that he was willing to burn every bridge possible in order to not concede anything and defend the most important thing in his life in that moment.
Covid has reduced social interaction for many people quite a bit over the past year and a half, and some people have gotten really out of practice and unfortunately picked up some really toxic social habits. Or maybe not picked up, just had them reinforced over the past year and a half even if it's not intentional. While I've moved past the phase of thinking it was my duty to "fix" these types of cases because it is quite frankly way out of my lane and has a super low % of success due to stubbornness it's not uncommon for me to fall into the trap of trying to do so anyway for an hour or two before snapping out of it.
Mineta wasn't the root cause of the issue and it was never about the character in MHA. It was about the guy feeling that his opinion wasn't treated as valid and getting angrier and angrier that once he expressed it again in what he likely felt was a safe space where he'd get agreement from everybody it instead turned into a debate and he didn't know how to deal with it in a healthy way once it got the opposite response he expected. I don't think he was in love with Mineta or his archetype, but to being right or maybe more accurately not feeling like he was wrong. He made the decision that not being wrong, in my view, was more important than any interpersonal relationships or the game he had invested a lot of hours into in that moment and decided to choose not being wrong over everything else.
I might be completely off base and it might have been something else. I'm not a therapist, and it's not my duty to 'fix' this person so I let him walk because he made the decision to do so. It's not my job to talk people off cliffs. I came into the table to have fun, and the guy made it impossible to have fun.
