I'm also glad you PMed Ken... I know I would have as well.

I must admit I am a little curious to who it was as well... but of course I won't ask you to say.

Quoting lyonsden5:

Quote:
While I don't condone what has happened let's not blow this out of proportion. All we know is one user threatened to give some a negative vote. The OP says himself he "assumes" the threat comes from a group. And all he did was say he would give a negative vote, not exactly the end of the world.

I have been threatened via PM by one of the most vocal people on this forum on more than one occasion and I know others have been as well. Threats of "making my life miserable if I don't stop corrupting the db." Well that (to me) is more of a threat than someone saying they will give you a negative vote. I made the decision to block any further PMs. I would suggest you do the same here.

Report it to Ken and move on. That's all you can do and IMO all that needs to be done. As Mark said, we have whatever rights Invelos gives us. Put down the pitchforks and let Ken do whatever he feels he needs to do.

You're quite right except for one thing, from the context over several PM's I was "threatened" to get constant negative votes. But this wasn't made clear in my post, so you couldn't know.

You're absolutely right if you request to put the pichforks down. Let Ken decide what's to do next.

Quoting Darxon:

Quote:
And the user should be banned permanently, not temporarily

I agree completly with you. This is not important if the user in question is a frequent poster, a good contributor to the database or a long time user. This is not acceptable and clearly an abuse of the system. And don't say that it's the first time, since it's perfectly possible that he/she have done the same thing to other users (nothing like that happen to me, never receive a negative for one post).

Ken maybe it would be necessary to check is reputation vote history.

Quoting Ken Cole:

Quote:
Any threat to give negative votes for improper reasons should be ignored as it is not possible to do so effectively, and any attempt will be automatically caught and handled.  We generally do not police PMs as there is a block system which will prevent future PMs from any user you designate.  That said, I will  review the PMs in question here and take action as requried.

Everything is going to be alright! 

Quoting Ken Cole:

Quote:
Any threat to give negative votes for improper reasons should be ignored as it is not possible to do so effectively, and any attempt will be automatically caught and handled.  We generally do not police PMs as there is a block system which will prevent future PMs from any user you designate.  That said, I will  review the PMs in question here and take action as required.

Thanks for posting Ken.

Thanks for chiming in so quickly, Ken.

While I agree with you that the threat is insubstantial because of your assertion you (meaning Gerri and yourself) will catch such abusive behavior easily, I don't think this is the main source of concern here. At least not for me, and hopefully for some others as well.

Like I said before, the reputation system and/or my reputation displayed next to my posts don't concern me too much (to a degree, yes, but it's nothing I actually spend time worrying about). However, the display of character surfacing by such actions is a completely different cup of tea, and THAT is what brought us the PM blocking feature and the reputation system in the first place: the desire to effectively stop certain types of intolerable actions taken by forum members towards others. THAT is what we've been trying to improve over the past months because we had reached a level of communication that was simply unbearable.

Well, if these features start to show certain people's ugliest side, all the better: now you know who they are and can take the appropriate actions. But take action you should, and make it publicly known as well. Otherwise, all the efforts to better the code of conduct between the community members might appear as hollow words with nothing and noone behind them to back them up when challenged.

Michael,

I'm sorry to hear about your problem. I agree with the predominate opinion here -- this is truly unacceptable behavior.

Brian

Hi Guys,

I don't understand the outrage here, when you give everyone power, you can expect a small percent to use it inappropriately. The star system, more precisely negative stars, insures abusive behavior.

An improvement to the stars system would be allow only good stars to be given by all. Select 5 or 6 individuals to give out bad stars. Oh! Jeez this is sounding too much like moderation...

Take Care
Rico