Intended as a reply to Robert's post on Community

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I may not be telling anyone anything they don't already know and/or have deduced on their own, but.... no one, not even Robert the Ubermod, is capable of banning anyone except by way of something resembling the placebo effect.

As much as we may love (or have become habituated to) the Zone, it seriously lacks administrative capability as compared, say, to any number of free PHP BBSs available at a click. I know, because I currently run two of them. (Yes, they have advertising, of the Google sort... Yes, it is easily disabled by the user, with Firefox and the AdBlock extension. Objection overruled...) Specific to the topic of banning, Habitable Zone's software cannot block IP addresses. A visit to a friend's house or a public library (or posting from work) is a quick and effective workaround for IP blocking, anyway.

In other words, 'banning' only works if the the subject is convinced that it does. Or if there's a 24-hour watch on the site by all of the moderators, in shifts, with the "delete post" tool at hand the minute something suspect shows up.

I'll be honest -- I've been tempted to summarily delete anything traceable to this Smyth character (who I remember from the MSNBC days), even in boards which are not 'my' jurisdiction. I want to do the same to anything posted by RL. I also want to stop Lindy from baiting him, because you know she's doing it on purpose, then runs crying to Mommy-rator, and I'm sick of that, too....

Maybe I'm sick of the Zone. Or maybe I'm merely sick of the vague notion that I'm partly responsible for its upkeep, because these days I seriously don't give a shit.

Frank, you might be especially interested in this: I stopped reading CE, where I'm allegedly co-moderator. I look at the subject lines. Period. I can pretty much predict which meme is being parroted by a glance at who posted it... and by the time I've arrived home from a day's work, I've already heard it all from sources closer to the originals, courtesy of NPR.

I guess you could say I've abdicated without announcing. Announcements of that sort don't carry much weight, based on past experience -- and I've stopped pretending that anyone gives a flying fuck what I think, anyway -- which is why I've all but stopped posting.

Why do I stay at all? I've got friends here, and people who I don't know well enough to consider friends, but whose personal revelations in Community and OT I find admirable. I often wish that the same group of people were available to me somewhere else, without the people I can't stand (and that list is a long one)... but they're not.