Customer Bans

[• Jay •]

I realize that the use of the company forums are a privilege, not a right, even as a customer.

I also realize that sometimes customers forfeit that privilege by being a disruption to the community.

However, I was thinking that it would serve IPS' interests to utilize posting restrictions instead of outright bans. This way, customers with a valid license could still access the IPS Marketplace to purchase or download mods/skins, and search the customer to customer support forum, but still be unable to cause any further disruption to the community.

If the customer required support for their add-on, that customer would need to find an alternative point of contact to receive it. That's just a price of being a disruption to the community. But at least they'd still be able to access the Marketplace.

[Charles]

We always employ posting restrictions for people who are troublesome however sometimes people will abuse that as well (such as posting nonsense while in mod queue just to annoy the staff, publicly posting screenshots of staff PMs asking them to behave, etc.). At some point it just gets to the point, though rare, that we must ban someone who is causing such a distraction it's becoming a problem.

We really rather our staff focus on helping everyone than be distracted by the small handful of people who persist in just being a distraction :smile:


For me personally, in the 10 or so years I have been doing this, I can count on one hand the number of actual clients I have been forced to ban. Most of the time a PM or a short term mod-queue is enough for people to cool down.

[• Jay •]

Totally understandable, Charles. :)

I was just referring to posting restriction, completely disallowing those members to post at all as an alternative.

[Charles]

Ah yes we normally do that actually... shut off posting but allow reading of topics.