A small number of members volunteer to act in the Site Admin role. Site Admins take care of the overall health and well-being of the site. They have the ability and authority to act on issues related to managing member accounts.
Admins help Facilitators in vetting early posts by new members. In the event that posts are made by an obvious spammer, Admin will disable that account.
In the event of spam attacks, Admins will use the board facilities to block accounts and check IP addresses, and initiate a registration lockdown if necessary.
Threads are placed in Quarantine when they are contentious and requests by the Facilitator haven't put it back on track. Admins monitor the progress of such threads, and will, if and when appropriate, clean up the thread and restore it. Alternatively, they may move the thread to the Wastebin.
Site Admin will take any of the following actions, as they feel appropriate and in the best interests of maintaining a friendly atmosphere on the site and protecting it from unsavory activity:
- Give a "timeout."
- An account is disabled for a specified period of time, during which the account is not able to view or post on the site. The intent of this action is to allow the member to "take a break" from the site, in the hope that they will return to post in a more productive manner. Timeouts range from 7 to 365 days, and are typically extended on repeat occurrences.
- Restrict accounts
- Members may have their accounts restricted, which means that they do not have access to PMs (Personal Messages), and their posts will not appear until approved by a Facilitator or Admin.
- Ban an account
- All access to the site is blocked. Bans are indefinite, and are a last resort after all other measures have failed. Consideration will on occasion be given to revoking a ban after at least a year has elapsed. In the case of obvious spammers, bans are instant and permanent.