Honesty and humbug

I see that there are people posting all over the place about the banning of Prokofy from Second Life Insider, including a comment by Tateru that he was banned for “incivility”.

I am still not in favour of banning people from being able to make comments on blogs, but I think that at the very least, rules like this should be explicit and should be applied fairly to all.

I don’t think anyone reading the annals of Second Life Insider would claim that Prokofy was a particularly civil poster of comments … but that also applies to a lot of other people too, and to some of the official posters to the site, in my opinion. Just read through some of the comments made about Prokofy, not by him. See any candidates for a charge of incivility there?

In the end, if you don’t make the rules explicit, and you don’t apply them fairly to all, then you have a system which is way open to abuse. To blame Prokofy’s banning on incivility is hogwash.