Originally Posted by
kball
Is there a ban quato staff members must meet each month or week?
Even though
suo said no, there is (he was probably just lazy to explain). It has to do with the forum software and the way it works, if new users join then it will take additional time to process these new users, so in order to balance resources you need to ban users. It makes sense right? Otherwise we would have to keep increasing the number of servers, but we don't have the money for that because new users don't necessarily bring any new income to toribash. So if 100 people join in one day, they need to ban 100 people in order to keep things balanced. Of course this isn't exact, because even if people are banned it takes a small amount of resources to maintain the whinebox and such, so actually you have to ban a few more people depending on the number of people who are already banned.
When things are unbalanced then you will see the forum slow down and crash and get database errors. If you remember the forum rollback at the beginning of the year, that is what happens if they don't meet their quotas and things get really bad - the forum rolls back to a time where there are enough users to balance it's load.
Does it all make sense?
I'll make a small example;
Say a forum can only handle 100 users at a time, if 10 people join the forum then we have to ban 10 people, otherwise there would be 110 users and the forum would slowly crash. So we ban 10 people.
However each banned person actually takes up around 10% of what an unbanned user takes up, we are actually at the equivalent of 101 users now, which will still make us crash (slowly). So we need to ban another user which will take us to 99.1 which is acceptable.
If 50 users joined and nothing was done, eventually the forum will roll back to when we were at a level less than 100, a stable level.
In general the lower downs (smods etc) are given quotas to fulfil, but it's up to the admins to make fine adjustments and keep the balance. If you look at the ban list you will see the smods do a lot of bans, and admins do only a few to perfect the balance.
Sometimes there is a need for huge bans when things go out of wack, that's when the ban scripts that juntalis (I think) come in to play in mass bans. Generally they target inactive users though.
I hope that helps explain why the system is necessary.