Patrick O'Keefe

Drool.

I can’t wait.

I always thought Barry Sanders was one of the greatest backs ever. But, for some reason, I never sat down and took a good look at his stats. Well, today, because of a thread at SF.n, I took a look.

Amazing. 10 seasons. 10 pro bowl appearances. 10 1,000 yard rushing seasons.

Jeez. I have a friend, Jackie McGhee. I get this e-mail from a spammer.

From: Brenda Mcghee
Title: jackie

Gimme a break.

The Google Blog has launched. Definitely something to keep an eye on.

Quite a few “Which Homestar Runner Character Are You?” quizzes around.

So, we’re driving back home (13 hour drive) and all of a sudden, we decide to stop somewhere with 4 1/2 hours to go on the drive. Not planned at all.

I had a Baseball Mogul League draft that I thought I had taken care of (sent in my draft list, etc.), so I didn’t need to be there. But, it turns out that I didn’t and if I hadn’t gotten there (I got there with 15 minutes to spare), I would have been forced to pass on both of my picks. Instead, I was able to make my picks.

Also, the Harry Potter special on ABC was later that evening and it had seemed like we were away from home every day except for the one day it was going to be on. We don’t really get ABC at home, so we weren’t going to see it. But, because we stopped, we were able to watch most of it.

Funny how things work out sometimes.

I found today’s Dilbert funny.

Last night, I found this really cool site for Homestar Runner fans. It’s called HomestarRunnerWiki. Check it out.

Happy Mother’s Day to all of the Moms out there… although… I wonder how many Moms actually read my blog.

I was reminded this evening of a practice that I thoroughly detest – publicly humiliating banned users on a community.

I’m really speaking of the most common way that I see it done, which is to ban the user and then to make their rank title display “Banned” or an equivalent. I am also seeing the facilitation of a public “Ban List” which will display all of the banned users for a given site. This is just as bad.

What can be gained by doing this? Nothing. It’s inflammatory and will only make the user that you banned angrier. When I ban a user, I ban the user – that’s it. Usually the user has been warned multiple times and/or has chosen to mock my staff, our guidelines or me in some way or another. I don’t give them user titles and I sure don’t have a list where people can call up every user I have ever banned.

To me, this shows a lack of professionalism. I have an unwritten policy that I will try not to discuss private issues (including the banning of members and the specific circumstances and messages that prompted the action) publicly or with anyone outside of my staff whenever possible. If I am forced to reveal the truth in public in order to defend an action, so be it, but I have no desire to try to continue the issue or hurt someone’s reputation by making it easily known that they are banned.

I can only think of three specific communities that utilize these practices, at this time, but there are many, many others out there. I’ve even been banned by one of them. For no good reason, obviously. Just an administrator who knew about as much about managing a team of people as I know about cricket.