If you go onto a website, or more specifically an Internet community and you find the admins to be evil and obnoxious or whatever, your best bet is to turn around and go away.  Believe me, I've learned this lesson the hard way over the years.

I've been on websites where the admins were just incredibly obnoxious and were in constant power trip mode. I am sure I must seem that way to some people too. Though I would describe myself more as apathetic than anything else. Which gets to my point:

There's no claims to being fair here. Joeuser is both a blog site and a community site.  If you just hang out on your own blog and write articles, you're pretty safe.  You can use the tools on JoeUser to keep people who bother you from even commenting on your articles.

But once you move off the reservation into the forums or other people's blogs, then you're fair game like everyone else (including me).  That said, we make no bones about fairness. The admins don't have to be fair. We don't claim to be fair. I've seen people seemingly go out of their way to antagonize me or Karmagirl or other admins on the site.  That's insane. We've only banned 4 people so far but we have been able to implement new features that allow us to take less drastic action.

Today's new access group is visitor.  Here's the situation: Someone has spent months building up their blog but on the forums they're obnoxious (and just so we're clear: obnoxious is defined as being obnoxious to an admin and admins do not have to justify what the term means).  Admins can set a user to have visitor access.  Visitor access isn't banning. But it confines them to their own blog. They can still write articles and comment on their own articles, but they can't comment on other people's articles (and be aware, when someone comments anonymously, on an admin screen it displays which user(s) have that IP or in that IP range with a couple more clicks).  This way, if we feel someone is a toxic user who is making the forums unpleasant we can remove them without them having to lose their blog and such. 

And of course, there is always the ability for someone to come back. A visitor can get put back to citizen and beyond. So it's not like being exiled. It's more like being confined to cool off a bit (though we anticipate most people who get put into visitor access will lose their tempers and just delete their blogs in a huff which is a fine solution as we then it's their decision not ours).

So hopefully this will help resolve some of the problems users have been complaining to us about.