^ - I absolutely agree. A classy response, @Aspenglow.
j
I’m still waiting for an answer to this too.
But it’s not difficult to admit to a mistake. Everyone makes mistakes. I’ve admitted to mistakes a few times and even PMed posters when I felt it was necessary and it hasn’t killed me yet. Admitting you’ve made a mistake and fixing or apologizing for it should be the normal thing to do. Just as Aspenglow quickly did. It definitely shouldn’t be applause worthy. For some reason, this board has a history/culture of not admitting to mistakes, even for the smallest thing. And I’m not talking about mods, it’s posters in general.
Since UltraVires hasn’t revisited the board since he left, could one of the mods use his contact email to send an update? I don’t think Discourse has the option to not receive emails from mods, which I think vBulletin did.
You are making a huge mountain out of a mole hill. UltraVires received a mod note based on my judgment that he was breaking rules specific to Great Debates:
Moderation in Great Debates and Politics and Elections
In general, Great Debates and Politics and Elections are the most contentious fora on the SDMB. Because of that, you’ll find that moderation is more active and prone to sanctioning posters. You can compare it to sitting at the holiday dinner next to the crazy uncle who can’t help being unpleasant. Please don’t be that guy.
Be aware that most rules are not ‘bright line’. This is intentional on our part as we believe such encourages poor behavior in some posters. It is not difficult to follow the rules - the vast majority of posters have no problems working inside the hazy confines we set - and if you find you need to know exactly where that line might be, you should look at why this is so meaningful to you.
In the end, we all get out of Great Debates and Politics and Elections what we put into them collectively. Try not to be the person who harms it for all the others. Treat all the posters, even ones with whom you disagree, with respect. If you must be disrespectful or insulting, please visit the BBQ Pit and do so there.
A few basic guidelines:
Everyone who comes to the SDMB presumably does so to enjoy themselves. Don’t take it so seriously. Keep it friendly.
As with academic politics, the passion is high because the stakes are small. We’re discussing and debating among like-minded people. No matter how good your solution to taxation issues might be the Dept of the Treasury is not reading the SDMB looking for silver bullet solutions. Be proactive with your passion. Support your arguments with zeal. But be polite when criticizing an argument you oppose. Pejorative language that comes across as jerkishness will be moderated.
Despite the quoted portion above, after discussion with my fellow mods and discussion held in this thread, I felt it was correct to rescind the mod note. Mod note, a rather gentle one in my opinion, not a Warning, mind. That UltraVires chose to take a respite from the board over a mod note was entirely his own decision. I don’t believe we’re required to write apologies specifically to posters who choose to leave the board of their own volition, which he did. If someone else chooses to do so, that’s entirely up to them.
I’m not really sure why the word ‘squiz’ bothers you so much. It’s just a term meaning to take a look at something. Your hostility over it seems outsized.
Isn’t it more like the other mods corrected you? I really doubt all the other mods agreed with you, but you decided on your own to rescind the note. Well good, because the mod note was a bad call. Should we offer you high praise for doing part of the right thing? Because the other part is an apology to the person you wronged, not the board in general.
Over a mod note and your refusal to consider his complaint as legitimate when he pointed out that you were wrong. Which you were, and you admitted you were. So yes, it’s because of your unfamiliarity with the norms of the forum you were moderating that caused him to leave. Nice try framing it as a respite, tho.
Is it written down? No. Is it normal human behavior to apologize when you accuse someone of something they didn’t do? Yes, it is. Since I assume you don’t have him on speed dial, writing him a note is the best way for you to contact him. You could have wrote him five notes in the time it took you to write your post.
I’m poking fun at you because you use a word that means nothing to most of the board. Do a search on it once, 95% of the returns are from you, with a couple from Australians. One who said that the word was obsolete in 2003. If you are going to give mod instructions on an American centric board, use words that people don’t have to guess the meaning from context. You seem to be on a one person crusade to bring it back.
Why do mods always think criticism of their calls is hostile? There is no hostility involved. I just think when you break something, you should fix it. In this case, the breaking is all on you. It would cost you nothing to reach out to UltraVires and explain what happened, yet you would rather scold me for disagreeing with you than to apologize. If I can reach out, and What_Exit can do the same, why can’t you?
As I said above, this is the second long term poster we lost in the last couple of weeks directly because of mod interaction. You have a chance to reverse one of them with a simple PM, but for some reason you won’t do it.
I’m not sure why your are still beating this drum. Aspenglow already explicitly apologized to UltraVires in this thread:
And @What_Exit said he’d reached out by DM
I doubt @UltraVires wants to get a lot of notes from mods. I know i wouldn’t. Either he’ll feel that the apology is enough enough, or he’ll decide he prefers a break from the board. More DMs just feel like pestering to me.
As for “squiz”, it’s not a word I’ve ever seen before, but it’s meaning was obvious from context. We all have our own linguistic quirks, and it seems weird for you to focus on that. Hostile, even.
The thing speaks for itself:
And FWIW, I think UltraVires is on to something with how he characterizes his own post, even if he doesn’t realize it. It’s precisely this “insult an argument” kind of response that I think too often gets admitted under the “attack the post” label.
No. That is not an “attack” on “the post.” It’s an insult. Not to the argument, but to the poster who presented it. Now, if the idea is that maybe we should walk back the rule about not insulting posters outside of the pit, I might actually be able to get on board with that because, again, I think civility is overrated and it’s possible to allow insults without having to all every kind of possible insult (much as even the pit has limits). But under the current paradigm… I don’t see how “insult[ing] an argument” by calling it “horseshit” is any better than just saying the poster who made it is “so full of shit.”
Here’s a simple way to determine if something is an insult without getting into a semantic debate.
Ask yourself, if someone told me my argument was horseshit, would I feel insulted? I would.
It’s not about being told I’m wrong. If someone says what I said was mistaken, or wrong, or they disagree, that’s a debate. If they say, “This is false, here’s a report that shows why,” okay fair enough.
I don’t think it’s always enough to “attack the post”, I think it depends on how you attack the post.
But does UltraVires have a point about that language not being modded at other times in GD so that he feels singled out? Maybe. As others said, that language isn’t unique there. That doesn’t mean that it all needs to be allowed, though. Maybe it just means there needs to be tighter control over what is a debate and what is just bickering.
I think I broadly agree with you here, and think the situation is complicated.
- UV’s post pretty clearly broke the “be polite when criticizing an argument you oppose” part of the rules.
- But it attacked the post, not the poster, which is the clearest thing we have to a bright line.
- But it did nothing to facilitate productive debate, instead working as a kind of shit-flinging that creates heat without light.
- But that sort of thing is far too common in Great Debates and doesn’t get modded often enough, and when it’s modded for UV, he plausibly feels singled out.
- But other conservative posters on the board (Falchion, WalterBishop, et al) are able to make their points without that sort of invective or receiving mod notes (that I’ve seen, anyway).
- Mordecai, buddy, take some deep breaths.
FWIW I’d appreciate seeing more such mod notes, not fewer. GD has for years had a reputation of unreasonable hostility, where people use tactics just like “your argument is horseshit” to quash attempts at productive conversation. I think the conversations are better when that kind of nonsense is mod-noted.
You are, just like many assuming the note was purely for the horseshit argument, part, and ignoring the terrible attempt at sarcasm part which was more personal in nature. The post was not “polite”.
And it was just a Note. In GD, Mods have a long history of telling people to 'dial it back" etc even when the rules are being followed. I am glad the Note was rescinded but IMHO it was not bad moderating. Undoubtedly someone or some few reported that post.
My WAG is that it was reported mostly due to the fact it was a unpopular poster. The issue really isn’t with the Mod, but the dudes who reported it, when they would likely never report a similar post made by a popular poster.
I wouldn’t.
If someone told me I was horseshit, that’s different.
~Max
ETA: Didn’t mean to tag ASL with this reply, but don’t know how to fix it.
What good does that do when he’s not here? You apologize to the person you wronged, not to a bunch of people standing around after they left.
Yes, and I thanked him for doing so, even tho it was Aspenglow that was responsible and not him. You know why he did it? Because it was the right thing to do. He didn’t have to be told that.
Are you close personal friends with him? If not, maybe you shouldn’t speak for him. He seems to like this board from the amount of time he spends here. I’m sure he would be very happy to get an apology from the mod that drove him off.
He doesn’t even know there was an apology because I guess it’s too much to ask that the person that drove him away from the board take two minutes to look up his email and inform him of that. Kind of like how you could have done the same instead of coming in to defend Aspenglow. This whole thing could have been settled yesterday if Aspenglow had reached out to UltraVires to apologize instead of apologizing to the board after he left.
I asked that he be sent an email, which only mods have. You know as well as I do that he hasn’t viewed the board since he left, unless he’s reading while signed out. If you feel like that is pestering also, why don’t you PM me the address and I’ll take the big risk of pestering him. I don’t view giving a person information they need to make a decision pestering.
No, it’s baloney. Posters shouldn’t have to rely on figuring out context when a mod tells them to do something. If Aspenglow can’t use the word “read”, there are plenty of other words she can use that don’t need explanations or context. I don’t think it’s too much to ask that a mod use clear language when speaking as a mod. If they are on a crusade to bring back an out of use word, use it as a poster, not when delivering instructions as a mod.
And again, just because I think a mod is wrong, which in this case there is no doubt, doesn’t mean I am hostile. This forum is specifically to talk about mods, indeed the only place you can. I wasn’t aware that I could only post here if I agreed with all mod decisions and heaped praise on them for doing the right thing.
That’s exactly what I said upthread. Mod the whole thread instead of picking out an individual poster for what everyone has always done. I realize a mod note to settle down sometimes leads to a active thread dying, but maybe that’s a good trade off for a more debate-like forum rather than a big gang argument.
I mostly agree, and I think we want the same end result. You think individual warnings/notes would work, I think general notes would work. Either way, hostility in GD is rampant and has been unchecked ever since I can remember. Whether we went with notes or warnings, they have to come early in the thread. Doing it at post 150 when things are already out of hand will probably just kill the thread. Oh, and my breathing is fine, thanks for your concern. 
Not according to the mod that issued the note.
I agree it was impolite, but the whole of GD has always been impolite.
No offense man, but I think you are pushing this way too hard. Aspenglow apologized and tagged him, then What_Exit sent a personal message. By default these will both generate email responses. UltraVires said he was taking a break for a while. I don’t see why the mods should bother him any more about it.
~Max
Your persistent attacks against the staff are growing more than a bit tiresome. As TubaDiva used to say, nowhere in the registration agreement does is say that you can beat members of the staff like a stubborn mule.
For continued attacks against the staff, your posting privileges are hereby suspended pending a review of the situation.
This thread is closed.