Feedback New Policy regarding Members caught with Multiple Accounts

Dear Members,

We have received messages from permanently banned members requesting that we give them a chance to access our site again.

This has given us some pause to think about our current policy regarding how we deal with such members.

Up until now, when we caught members with Multiple Accounts, we gave them a chance to publicly confess to keep their (merged) accounts, or we publicly exposed them ourselves, merged their accounts, and permanently banned them.

Permanently banning someone means permanently silencing them which the more we think about, the more it feels like censorship and thus in conflict with our "Uncensored" principle.

So from now and until further notice, when we catch a Member with Multiple Accounts, we will give them a chance to publicly confess like we have in the past, but if they refuse to confess, we will publicly expose them and merge their accounts like in the past, but instead of permanently banning them, we will slow down their access to our site for a period of 6 months. This will allow them to continue to participate, but will make their use of our site extremely frustrating for half a year.

We believe the public humiliation and slowing down of their access for 6 months will be enough of a deterrent to keep Members from opening multiple account without needing to permanently silence anyone.

Even under our stricter rules in the past, we still got multiple accounts, so there is no perfect solution that will completely prevent Members from having multiple accounts, but we believe this new solution provides a more balanced approach.

Of course, if this results in an increase in Multiple Accounts, we will reevaluate our solution and course-correct accordingly.

So effective immediately, those Members who had been previously banned for having had Multiple Accounts and refusing to publicly confess have had their accounts unbanned and can access our site again if they so wish. If we have missed your account and you still find yourself banned, please contact us.

 

We agree 100% which is why we have always been the strictest about this particular rule.

This is a tough one because of the absolute nature of a permanent ban and the fact that such a ban silences them forever. We fully believe members caught with Multiple Accounts should be punished. Part of that punishment is the public humiliation of a public confession admitting they were deceiving their peers which destroys their credibility and forces them to earn it back via good behavior and goodwill. So that alone is quite punishing because it means they will carry that stigma with them forever which will have a long-term effect on their credibility while diluting the strength of their posts and arguments. Now, when they don't publicly confess (which most don't because they find it too humiliating), the new punishment in lieu of a permanent ban is to slow down their access for 6 months. Few people have experienced the effects of this, but it makes the site extremely frustrating to use as every single pageload is slowed down significantly. So it will make the offender waste a tremendous amount of time in order to participate here, without actually silencing them and thus staying truer to our uncensored nature where everyone gets a chance to speak their mind here about any gambling topic they like. In some ways, this punishment of a slowdown without revoking access is worse, particularly for those who are very active on the site (or just trolling). With a permanent ban, they would just leave the site and not bother again because there was nothing they could do about it due to the permanent nature of the ban. With this new policy, they are likely to stick around (since they will still be able to participate) and therefore waste a tremendous amount of their time staring at their screen waiting for each page to load for 6 months straight, at the satisfaction of their peers who will know that for each message the offender posts, they had to waste so much of their time and go through an agonizing process to do so. It is an extremely frustrating experience and therefore a very severe punishment but without taking away their ability to speak their minds if they're willing to endure those torturously-long pageloads. Think of it as solitary confinement for a long time vs. the death penalty. Some may very well prefer a swift death than the psychological agony of the alternative. We are also quite confident that after experiencing 6 months of the slowdown, they will not repeat their mistake and will have learned their lesson.

We will never tolerate Multiple Accounts because they affect the integrity of the community the most, so we will always merge Multiple Accounts when we catch them, and there will always be some form of punishment for that rule violation. The question is, how severe and permanent should the punishment be? Some folks in a heated discussion and during a moment of weakness may be tempted to create Multiple Accounts to add fake support for their point of view. That is -- of course -- very wrong. But permanently silencing them for refusing to admit to that temporary moment of weakness seems counter-productive to a community that wants to hear from all gambling voices, including the weak.

Thank you as always for your valuable feedback. Let's wait to see the effects of this new policy and then judge it accordingly. We can always go back to our old policy (or revise it further), so no policy is ever set in stone as we always try to course-correct and continuously improve.

 

This question tends to come up quite often and cause some confusion, but we're always happy to clarify.

We are uncensored in relation to gambling. As in, you can discuss any gambling topic you like here without being censored. Period. This is intimately tied with our other core principle of "independence", as in we are not beholden to any gambling interests or any gambling products or services that may make our moderation here biased in any way. In other words, we have no gambling products or services to sell and therefore have no motivation or incentive to censor any discussion that may go against said interests, products, or services. This is one of the reasons we saw an opportunity to create GamblingForums.com under our 3 core principles since we noticed that most gambling forums across the industry are run by someone trying to sell you some gambling product or service. How can a community have open and honest discussions if those controlling the community have a conflict of interest? Whether they do it intentionally or not, having skin in the game (interests, products, services, etc.) affects the bias of the moderating team because they will naturally want to steer the conversation towards their products and services, steer the conversation away from any competition, push and promote positive posts about their products and services, and censor any negative feedback about them. We have no such conflicts of interests as we don't own any products or services in the gambling industry (other than this site), so you can discuss any gambling topic you like here and we won't censor it.

So to re-iterate, uncensored here means you can discuss any gambling topic here without being censored. Uncensored does not mean you can spam your product, insults other members, or post child pornography.

See relevant posts on this here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. See relevant threads on this here and here.

 

Great idea regarding the addition of a "Multiple Accounts Violator" tag (although it's a bit long for a tag). Leaving a permanent stigma on someone's account that appears in every single one of their posts is something we only want to do on very rare occasions. The Compulsive Liar tag you mentioned, for example, has only been given to 3 members out of almost 3,000 (LarryS, Boz, and SteveH) because they provably lied multiple times and we could not waste any more time chasing them around and addressing their lies so the tag and their signature with the links to where they were caught lying allowed their lies to be addressed automatically without our involvement and without censoring them. So we only use such stigmas in the absolute most egregious of cases. Let's see how this new policy works out, and if the slow down and public shaming is not enough of a deterrent, we can incorporate your idea of the tag to see if that makes it a strong enough deterrent.

 

Please report such suspicious accounts because we always investigate them. If any of the suspicious accounts are connecting via VPN's or proxies, for example, we'll ask them to stop connecting via them so that we can ascertain whether they are a sock puppet or not.

 

Keep in mind that if you violate our rules in your reply and we see it (e.g. because someone reported it), then you will be sanctioned as well. So the best course of action is to ignore and report any posts that violate our rules so we can deal with them. If you feel you must reply to a post that violates our rules and cannot stay quiet, then make sure your reply is respectful and does not violate our rules as well to avoid getting sanctioned yourself.

Remember that we do not read the vast majority of posts on our site, so if a post violates our rules and no one reports it, then the offender will likely go unpunished. That doesn't mean we are no longer enforcing our rules. It simply means we haven't seen the post in question because no one has reported it. Reporting posts that violate our rules brings them to our attention immediately so we can deal with them accordingly.

We have very little interest in gambling (again, no products or services to make us biased), which is why we don't keep abreast of the discussions on our own site unless it's a post in the Feedback section or someone brings us up as those are meant specifically for us. The more detached and disinterested Forum Admins are from the subject matter of their community, the more unbiased their moderation tends to be. We don't care about gambling, but we do care deeply about our community and providing our members the best experience possible.