My apologies (putting aside the issue of what the thread is “actually about”). The answer is that other than those instances he hasn’t made a post we’ve considered a personal insult as opposed to an attack on a group. He was warned for the direct insults and mod noted for the comments about religious people/political parties/etc. when those were particularly over-the-top or not on topic. You’re correct that the notes haven’t escalated to warnings, but we also didn’t jump between notes and warnings at random; in that situation warnings are usually repeated and they’ll often be followed by a suspension.
Since I am sure I’ll get asked about this: yes, I mentioned the formal warnings earlier and I said they’re not totally dissimilar from the posts he is sometimes mod-noted for. The point I was trying to make is that he has received warnings from the mods (I think at least one poster said otherwise) and that we don’t overlook this behavior when we feel it clearly breaks the rules. When it’s borderline or poses more of an attractive nuisance as a thread hijack, we’ve opted for mod notes because we’ve felt that’s the appropriate response to a post that’s potentially inflammatory or could cause a hijack or provoke people but which is not on by itself a personal insult or completely off-topic or completely jerk-ish. I understand that the related complaint is that Der Trihs does it a lot, but see the preceding. That’s been my understanding of our rules and of the way we’ve agreed on dealing with these posts and posts like them, and if tomndebb feels this shows a flaw in the way we’ve handled it we’ll discuss that and go from there.