Mod here. Please don't try to munchkin our rules to find a way to deanonymize someone from a ban that was intended to be anonymous. (It's fine to give other evidence that you might have.)  People may choose to reply or not to reply to things for a bunch of different reasons. We really don't endorse pressuring people to engage on a given Forum thread. (See also: You don't have to respond to every comment.)

We are issuing timunderwood a warning for this comment. This is a needlessly inflammatory comparison.

Hi Bob,
1. We have been responding to your messages in intercom, I don't know what you mean. It's true that our moderation team is slower to respond than usual because we are overloaded right now, but I think you can probably guess why we are overloaded.
2. You are probably commenting on popular posts and we don't show all the comments from those on the Frontpage. I think we never show more than 4 or 5. The forum is open source, so you can look through the code to see the logic we use to decide which comments to display, if you would like.
3. I don't know who... (read more)

We are banning trevor1 and their alternate account for one month for messaging users and accusing them of being sock puppets, even after the moderation team asked them to stop. (The moderation team has confirmed that at least some of these accusations were false.) If you believe that someone has violated Forum norms such as creating sockpuppet accounts, please contact the moderators.

Please note that this topic can get heated for several reasons:

• abuse/violence is already a topic people understandably have strong feelings about
• the discussion in this comment is getting into comparing two populations and asking which of them has it worse, which might make people feel like the issues are being trivialized or dismissed. I think it might be best to evaluate the issues separately and see if they are promising as cause areas (e.g. via the ITN framework).

In particular, there's a tendency to contrast "violence against women" with "violence again... (read more)

Closing comments on posts
If you are the author of a post tagged "personal blog" (which notably includes all new Bostrom-related posts) and you would like to prevent new comments on your post, please email forum@centerforeffectivealtruism.org and we can disable them.

We know that some posters find the prospect of dealing with commenters so aversive that they choose not to post at all; this seems worse to us than posting with comments turned off.

Hi, just to clear some things up: the warning and ban are for this comment by 3f6f6014. ^[1]

We've just enabled a system that we're testing to avoid showing spam or severely norm-breaking comments by users who've just joined, by which comments posted by new users don't show up for other users until they've been checked by a Forum mod or facilitator. 

The comment I issued a warning for is extremely downvoted and disagree-voted, so I assumed that people were seeing it, although it had the note from the new system "[This comment will not be visible to ... (read more)

I agree that the current norms are probably not clear enough to cover this situation, we are thinking about adding more specific ones.

As a non-american, I also initially found the lack of use-mention distinction to be very counterintuitive. But it's culturally very important for a very large fraction of forum readers, so I would also ask you to edit your initial comment. If you don’t do that, we may just edit the comment for you.

Using "n-word" would definitely not count as "misleading or manipulating". If you wanted to be absolutely precise I would recommend linking to the original source.

Update: we're issuing the commenter a 1-month ban for this comment. If they return to the Forum, we'll expect a higher standard of norm-following.

[Edit: the ban is for this comment, not the top-level post.]

Possible Vote Brigading

We have received an influx of people creating accounts to cast votes and comments over the past week, and we are aware that people who feel strongly about human biodiversity sometimes vote brigade on sites where the topic is being discussed. Please be aware that voting and discussion about some topics may not be representative of the normal EA Forum user base.