On the whole I think MO has done fairly well so far at stamping on the trolls (but I speak only as an observer, not as a moderator).

I don't agree that I was suggesting exaggerated firmness. With repeated doubling, starting with one day, it would only be on your 6th offence that you'd get banned for a month. If someone hasn't learnt by the 6th offence, then we're no longer talking about someone who has accidentally violated etiquette. Trolls are really annoying. They waste a lot of time and they're divisive.

I think linear growth is pretty good. It's a growth rate that I can justify to the person I'm suspending while still treating them like a person. The desired outcome of a suspension is to give somebody the choice to either play nice or stop using the site, not to start a game of cat and mouse. My gut feeling is that a much faster growth rate is much more likely to turn a good-faith but poorly behaved user into an actual troll.

Personally, I believe in reforming. In other words, it's both unproductive and amoral to hold people responsible for their past actions for eternity. Consequently, in the absence of new violations, the record should be periodically purged. That's how the point system for driving offenses works in the US, for example.

If you increase suspension length by 1 after each offence, then after time $T$, the number of offending posts from a repeat offender can go up like $\sqrt T$. If you increase the suspension length by a constant multiplier then it can go up like $\log T$. It seems to me that square root growth is too fast and logarithmic is much preferable, while still allowing tolerance for what may occasionally be genuine errors of judgement.

There is always the anecdote about "Besicovitch's English" to bear in mind, as well...

Fine. Whatever.

I'll let everyone know when my blog is ready. Feel free to drop by and comment if anyone wants.

Andrew L.

Much appreciated =).

I'm sorry for choosing imagery which, on rereading, I see was unnecessarily personal. I've edited my comment.

If I understand correctly, Scott Morrison has asked you not to interact with Harry. (You haven't yet disputed this claim on his part, in any event.) If this is indeed correct, then, since you did interact with Harry, you earned your suspension (and the 5 days was a formal consequence of the formula for durations of suspensions).

For me, the key point is that the moderators here are working mathematicians who put aside time to help keep MO running. They shouldn't have to be sending emails, making value judgements about whether any particular comment is over the line or not, sending emails about these judgements, and so on; rather, they are entitled to arrange their moderation duties to be as streamlined and automatically executing as possible. As far as I can tell, this is what Scott has done: he and the other moderators set up a clear line, and you crossed it.

Perhaps you are implicitly complaining that the line they marked was unfair. If so, I don't agree. I saw various mini-flame wars in comments in the early days of MO, which were eliminated thanks to some reasonably heavy-handed moderation, and the site is the better for it. The moderators are now rightly careful in ensuring that no further flame wars erupt. This is surely the goal of their restriction on you and Harry. What you consider a joke can seem like baiting to others, and the moderators are well within their rights to ban certain behaviour that they consider unacceptably risky. Again, remember that they are running this site in their spare time, and so are entitled to arrange things so as to minimize the unpleasantness of their duties. (Putting out the fires of a flame war is never pleasant.)

If you abide by the restrictions that the moderators impose then your problems with them will disappear.

Yours sincerely,

Matthew Emerton

That being said-I DO apologize for posting it.Technically, you're correct,it's immoral at best and possibly illegal even with telling Scott I was going to do it.But I was very concerned about this becoming a "he said/he said" exchange.

@VP Thank you for your reluctant defense of me. You don't think I'm entirely innocent in this matter-that's fine. But thanks for agreeing with me that Scott's reaction was completely out of bounds.

@Scott Again,I posted the email text because I didn't want this to become a grossly distorted if not duplicitous "he said/he said" exchange-I wanted the members to see the ACTUAL comments and judge for themselves.I'm glad you agreed.

But honestly-I've gone without incident for months.My VERY brief comment to Harry was done in jest since what he said was so obviously absurd. All you had to do was email me a warning regarding my comments and my grammar. I'd have deleted the comments,corrected the post's grammar and backed off.

And that would have been the end of it.

Did you really feel this was necessary in this case? To make an example out of me over something this trivial?!?

I think even the most antagonistic poster towards me would have privately considered this to be excessive to say the least.

It strongly suggests there was something other then zealous moderating at work here.Something less then objective. And the other controlling members of MO here should ask themselves if that's something we want from the moderators.

Sincerely, Andrew L.

In all the episodes in which we've issued repeated suspensions, there have been clear triggers laid out, precisely so there's no need for the moderators to get sucked into arguments.

Reason for deletion:

I made the original post trying to be funny (exemplifying a stereotype is funny to me, I dunno!), but then I realized that nobody else thought it was as funny as I did, whence came my deletion.

On Sun, Sep 19, 2010 at 4:34 PM, Scott Morrison scott@tqft.net wrote:

Hi Andrew

Unless there's something that I'm missing in the (deleted) interaction at http://mathoverflow.net/questions/39214/propositional-logic-and-first-order-logic-textbook/39262#39262, you've again broken the rule: no interaction with Harry. I've suspended your account for 5 days.

I'm also somewhat disappointed by your exasperated response to people's request that you punctuate in the usual manner at http://mathoverflow.net/questions/4836/what-introductory-book-on-graph-theory-would-you-recommend/37767#37767. It's been made perfectly clear that we expect professional behaviour at MathOverflow. Failure to punctuate properly is not professional, and being offended when people point this out to you is worse.

Finally, you might want to be careful about statement such as the one in http://mathoverflow.net/questions/39214/propositional-logic-and-first-order-logic-textbook/39251#39251, "This is the book I would recommend to any of my students if they asked me about logic.", as it somewhat misrepresents your position in the mathematical community, by implying that you have students. This point is unrelated to the suspension, I just thought it might be helpful to point this out.

best, Scott Morrison

Scott,

Boy,didn't take much,did it? I knew going back to MO was a mistake. And I am a graduate student-I fully expect to have students of my own in the near future. So the comment was speaking of when I AM in that position and I think it was clear to anyone.

These are the lamest,most laughable excuses yet for banning me.And anyone looking at it objectively would agree.

But that's the sweetness of power,isn't it?

It's completely arbitrary.

This is almost comical,this suspension.So I'm just going to go off and do meaningful things for my career while you celebrate. Very well done,really commend your creativity.

And I'm posting a copy of the text of this email at meta. Let's see what other people think.

Andrew L.

"It might be helpful to point it out." I think other then Harry Gindi-who I'm sure is going to get a huge belly laugh out of this-the only one Scott is helping here is himself.

What comments did he delete?All I said was,after Harry recommended Bourbaki's set theory text as an introduction to mathematical logic;quote "He's hopeless,I give up." (See for yourselves,if he didn't convieniently delete it.)

And THAT was grounds for a 5 day suspension?!?

Oh sorry-that and I missed a semicolon in one of my posts and he was offended by me saying when I have students,that was the book I'd recommend because it's "misleading". Because of course,Scott doesn't think I'll ever have students of my own someday.............

Be careful-you get on any of the moderators' bad sides,they can suspend you as well for missing a semicolon.Or writing functional notation on the right Herstein style.Or not saying excuse me for belching.Or whatever.

This board is really not worth my time anymore. Seriously.

I hope some of you are as outraged as I am. And worried about the precedent it sets here.

If you're not,you should be.

Sincerely, Andrew L.