Because I sent him a PM and asked him to?
Because it happened 4 years ago, maybe?
That’s a point, however that should have been clearly expressed in the explanation as to why no official warning was issued, if indeed it was the reason.
If, for example, someone admitted they created a sock and never got caught and a quick investigation proves this to be true, but it was over 4 years ago, is it ignored?
Don’t know the answer. Just asking.
Now this is the Dio Show!
The Dio show forces everyone else on the SDMB to decide which is worse - one bloviating bombast or a platoon of hypersensitive, Captain Ahab-esque archivists with emotional hemophilia.
Ooh ooh ooh I know, pick me! Pick me!
OK. Which is worse?
The whole board sinks , leaving the bloviated bombast and the Ahab-esque archivist mortally wounded and lashed together by harpoon lines of metaphor with only Cat Whisperer afloat - clutching Autolycus’ coffin - to be rescued by the Giraffe Boards.
If you ask me - not that you did, but supposing you had 
- that was a dubious ruling by Miller.
Posting by proxy, as I understand it, is where a poster is doing nothing more than conveying someone else’s position to the board. But suppose you discuss with your spouse something you read on the board and he/she makes a point that you later post on the board. Is that posting by proxy?
In this case, Dio is claiming - if I understand him correctly - that other people pointed out the evidence to him, and that he personally found it credible, which led him to post. When he was posting he was posting as himself, expressing his own opinions. I don’t see that as posting by proxy. If it is, this should have very broad application. Perhaps this should be clarified in an ATMB thread.
OTOH, that also means that the claim that other people PMed him is not particularly relevant to the question of whether he was being a jerk in that thread.
[Which he was, IMHO. Not so much for questioning the story, but for the forceful way in which he did it. Also, and FTR - since I’ve been defending him here to a limited extent - he was being an even bigger jerk in the Saddad thread. And in addition, his claim here that it was not a true pregnancy being discussed is belied by his own words in the original thread, in which he didn’t mention anything about this, and simply downplayed the loss of a pregnancy.]
I guess you could argue that a guy who acts like a jerk when he’s prodded into it by other people is not as big of a jerk as a guy who does it on his own. Not much to go by, but something.
Pretty much sums it up.
But I think it’s just part of Dio’s and the SDMB’s nature:
Frog, meet Scorpion
WABBlT SEASON!!!
(ahem) ladies and gentlemen of the pit, as the poster who idiotically, stupidly, and pointlessly brought up the blurb in question, I admitted I shouldn’t have done it and apologized to **Diogenes **for bringing it up. I (naively) hoped that after no one pounced on it right away it would just drop.
Also, **Diogenes **does apologize to **Sad Dad **in post 38 of the original thread.
Diogenes, after seeing the way you’re posting in this thread, I’m going to attempt to give you some advice, against my better judgment. In this thread I see a perfect example of how your posting style contributes to page-length hijacks and why you irritate people.
The main problem is that you don’t bother to put enough thought in your posts. You are a lazy poster. And since you are a confrontational poster also, with some controversial opinions, and have some tendencies towards being a jerk in the interest of “truth”, what you do irritates posters more than if you were a bland poster doing the same thing.
In this thread, I see you posting one-sentence posts with no explanation of what there is to support that statement. Also, you have the tendency to say the same thing over and over, repeating the same comment to 5 different people in the thread. That is totally unnecessary. Say something once and be done with it. You don’t have to reply to 5 different posters saying exactly the same thing. You don’t have to answer every single post with the same broken record.
Example of a post that is calculated to start a fight:
You have to explain why it was not a real pregnancy. When discussing the subject way back when, you used the word yourself, e.g. here where you yourself say They just lost a pregnancy. Nobody died. It sucks but it doesn’t come close to equalling the tragedy of losing a real child.
To the casual reader, seeing you in this thread now saying it wasn’t a real pregnancy when back then you said it was a pregnancy looks like you are lying to cover your ass. If you don’t want to rehash the fight, then fine, don’t rehash it. But your one-sentence half-assed justifications make you like like a liar if you don’t add further explanation.
Example of posts where you repeat yourself multiple times: we don’t need the echo. Say something once and shut up. You don’t have to say it over and over and over. You sound like a five-year-old.
I count five or six posts where you say “I’m not going to refight a five-year-old battle.” When you post multiple one-liners like that saying the same thing your posts start to dominate the thread. It’s totally useless and just plain irritating. It’s OK to tell people “I have said all I have to say on the subject” and then SHUT UP and WALK AWAY FROM THE THREAD. You don’t have to have the last word on everything. I’ve done that myself many a time.
At this point, I see one of two possibilities:
You probably will think “fuck him” and blow me off,
or
You sincerely want to change your posting style but are incapable of it.
I think the correct guess is the latter, but I thought I would give my opinion anyway. Maybe I’m wrong and you are able to argue more cogently, in a way that starts less trainwreckes.
I’m hoping you’ll take this with the same careful consideration as if I were someone sending you a private PM asking you to go start a fight at the board. 
As hilarious as I found that moderator comment (coming as it was 4 years after the incident)… I agree with you. To use a completely non-inflammatory example, if a bunch of people PMed one another about hosting a Dopefest, and then everyone asked one poster to start the thread, is that posting by proxy? I’m not convinced the motives and/or consequences of behavior should be used as a guide to enforcement of the rules.
Alright! I win! Wait…
Yeah, is getting picked up by the Giraffe Boards really a win? Could be worse; could be DoMeBo!
I was thinking more along the lines of a Pyrrhic victory - I win, but there’s no one left.
Wow–I’m off the board for a day and a half, and I TOTALLY expected when I got back to see you taking this easy opportunity to apologize for being a jerk. I mean, I got you fair and square here, and I explained why this is the sort of thing that bugs people, and you’ve already said you want to change.
So where’s the sincere admission that you fucked up? Did I miss that post? Because maybe I did–I admit I skipped over some of the dumbassery about a 5-year-old thread.
Wait - what’s the difference between a real pregnancy and a fake one? 
From personal experience, I can tell you that it’s easier to quit smoking than it is to stop reading Dio pittings.
I swear I won’t open that thread again. I won’t. Nope.
Aw, shit…I gotta see.
Oh, sure, you feel good at first, but then the guilt!
I’m so weak.
Sure, I’m always happy to answer questions. I had to do a bit of research to figure out which warning you were talking about. I think you mean this one?
So, what you have there is a pretty unambiguous rules violation. Yeah, it’s possible to interpret your last line in that post (which is, I believe, what drew the warning) as not having anything to do with ignore lists, but it’s a pretty heavy stretch to reach that conclusion. And it’s not just a matter of casually mentioning that someone is on your ignore list, which in most situations probably would result in a mod note. You’re directly taunting the person your ignoring with the fact that they’re on your ignore list. Which is precisely the sort of behavior we’re trying to avoid with that rule. On top of that, it’s a naked swipe, in an ATMB thread, at another poster’s response to a third party, in which (on a quick skim of the thread) you had no stake. So, right there, I’d say all that bumps it up to a full-fledged warning.
Dio’s offense is far less clear cut. I deliberated a bit before writing that note, but finally decided that he was just on this side of the unacceptable. Lots of people discuss what happens on the boards in off-board contexts. A lot of couples post here, for example. If my boyfriend and I are both posters, and my boyfriend points out to me that there’s a huge inconsistency in someone else’s post, am I barred from ever mentioning it, even if I agree that it’s a troubling inconsistency? That’s clearly a ridiculous implementation of the rule. What Dio did is fairly close to that. I don’t believe that Dio posted in that thread just to stir up trouble. I take him at his word that, once it was pointed out to him, he thought it was a genuine inconsistency, and wanted to see it resolved one way or the other. I don’t question his motives at all. The the real infraction, here, is from the people who sent him the PMs. People who, judging by Dio’s account, were looking to stir up trouble, and took steps to ensure that none of the trouble stuck to them, personally. Those folks deserve a full warning, if not an outright suspension. But, unfortunately, they’re effectively untouchable: I don’t know who they were, and I don’t have access to the PMs that would demonstrate their identities, and… well, there’s a whole host of other issues surrounding the moderation of PMs that I don’t want to get into right now. The best I can do is try to get people not to play along with that sort of shit. Hence, Dio gets a mod note, not because he’s in trouble, but because he’s engaging, innocently, in an action that the Administration here have determined to be ultimately detrimental to the health of the boards.
Also, as has already been pointed out, Dio’s posts were four years ago. If he’d mentioned the PMs at the time, he might have drawn a more severe reprimand. Putting something into his permanent record at this remove would be unfair, if for no other reason than infractions are tracked by the date the warning was issued, not the date the offending post was made. A four year old warning will almost always be discounted when we review someone’s posting history. A recently minted warning for a four year old infraction would be, at best, an unnecessary confusion.
Lastly, the decision to issue a mod note versus an official warning is left purely to the discretion of the individual moderator. Any infraction that warrants a mod note technically also merits a warning. It’s up to our personal judgment which is most appropriate for a given situation. I feel that Dio’s post only deserved a note. A different mod might have felt differently. Dio was lucky enough that I was the mod on the spot, instead of someone else. You weren’t as lucky back when you got warned in ATMB. Them’s the breaks.