The link should be disabled or removed. At the very least, there should be a description of the content, as Guin notes upthread.
The post should get a warning. Insta-ban is over the top, but it was the height of threadshitting and being a jerk. Considering all the petty crap that does get warnings–see Jack Batty’s warning for example–letting this slide is especially bizarre.
This isn’t a slam on Ellen Cherry, who is a pretty good mod. I appreciate her light touch with warnings. But if anything deserves a warning, floater’s post does.
Just to reiterate my post in the Pit thread, banning no - absent a pattern I think that is way, way over the top.
But a formal warning would have been appropriate IMO, given that he sort of broke the jerk rule in more than one way at once ( blatant thread shitting + unshielded NSFW link ).
Don’t mods have ways of contacting each other that don’t involve individual board members sending them a barrage of pissed-off messages? :dubious: Is there not a way for another mod to edit his post and add a disclaimer?
Again, I didn’t make a call to ban him. I’m calling to treat his post the way you would treat any other posting of a shock site.
Yes, we have email. But if a mod is too busy to check her email or is just too busy to deal with the issue at the moment, then it has to wait. Almost all moderating here falls into that category. The mods are already talking about this by email and Ellen Cherry will respond to the emails and/or this thread when she has a chance. That may take a little while. In the meantime samclem already added a warning to the link.
Yes you did-your title is my cite. As far as moderators contacting each other goes, they have the exact same methods anyone else has. If someone is away from the computer, they are pretty much incommunicado from everyone…unless you are suggesting that this situation is so dire that they attempt to phone her lest something disastrous happens before she happens to come back online. Personally, I really don’t see that sort of emergency in this situation.
The problem is that the moderators are spread out all over the world. So they need to reflect the signal off the moon so everyone sees it. Consequently, the electric bill is enormous and they try to limit its use to real emergencies like when the Legion of Ignorant Evil strikes.
A year and a half ago,** salinqmind** posted a thread about his/her cat not eating. I quoted a line from the OP that said “I’ve gotten samples of Iams and such - won’t touch it.” and replied “you can probably get him to eat if you use a hammer. Go to Lowes and ask if they have an M.C. in stock.”** Ellen Cherry** came by and gave me a mod note saying “Not helpful, Rhythmdvl, and jerkish. Cease.”
It was not a warning. Everything was explained (won’t touch it/M.C. Hammer), there was Kumbaya singing and cake, etc. No problem. This is not a if I-can’t-jump-off-a-bridge-than-why-can-he post.
It’s a WTF, if something like that was worthy of comment—and described as “jerkish”—posting gruesome pics (I haven’t gone to the link) without warning and without the two-click style is far beyond jerkish; it’s downright shitty.
It’s kind of topical that we just went through the question of URL shorteners and how some people want to know where they’re going before clicking a link. This isn’t exactly on point (the link isn’t as recognizable as somethingawful), but it’s close and it underscores some of those concerns.
There was no way posting that unexplained link in the context of that thread is anything other than an intentional attempt to cause distress, angst and gross people out. Un-fucking-conscionable.
In this case, it was the URL that tipped me off to avoid clicking the link. The URL was to a website called something like ooze.com. I’ll admit I wasn’t think dead cats - I was thinking it was going to be a link to a picture of a cat with a suppurating infection.
