Damn, that was a real “because I can” banning, if I ever saw one. Ouch.
no u.:rolleyes:
To be clear, I was in no way drawing an equivalency between handy’s behavior and Q.E.D.'s Handy in fact did engage in the kind of behavior that leander attributes to Q.E.D., that is, posting the first thing that came into his head, or doing a quick search and then posting the first link whether it was relevant or not. As you say, handy rarely returned to a thread to post additional information. It was evident that his only interest was getting his post count as high as possible.
Q.E.D., as you note, does not do this. He sometimes answers off the top of his head, and sometimes is wrong. But he usually remains engaged in the thread. His general batting average in GQ is quite high, and substantially higher than most posters.
The only reason I mentioned handy was to counter the assertion, sometimes made, that standards on answering questions were stricter back in the halcyon days of manhattan. Handy engaged in this behavior for years and amassed some 17,000 posts while being rarely if ever called on it by the GQ moderators for most of the time he was here (although he was Pitted for it several times).
To respond to this, making jokes in GQ is not against the rules. We do ask that posters allow the OP to be answered before cracking a joke, and sometimes will issue a moderator note if someone is too quick to post one. However, even when they occur they don’t seem to be reported very much (so they don’t evidently bother most people all that much). So don’t assume we have seen it if you personally haven’t reported it.
But I really don’t think most people would appreciate much it if we started to police GQ with a heavy hand. We would need a lot more moderators, for one thing. Besides taking action against a lot more posts, we would also have to deal with a lot more pit threads by posters accusing us of being humorless jackbooted fascists. (We get enough of those now.) And we would probably have more accusations of inconsistency - Why did you take action against this post, but not that one! And no, people wouldn’t get used to the new standards and adjust their behavior - with free posting, we will always have a stream of newbies unfamiliar with our conventions.
In GQ, as in other forums, the quality of the discussion is largely due to the members who participate. As moderators in GQ, our job is to facilitate questions being answered by preventing fights from breaking out or other kinds of hijacks and distractions. It’s not now, and never has been, our role to ensure the facts are correct or the jokes are funny. That’s your job as posters.
That’s not to say that if someone persistently posts misinformation or does nothing but post inane jokes we might not take stronger action, but we would probably do so only in extreme cases.
Thank you for the detailed answer. I do appreciate you taking the time.
I was under a misconception that the GQ mods had agreed that a GQ thread should be given time to be answered before the WAGs and jokes were posted. I now know this is only a hope and not anything normally enforced.
I won’t bother searching for the pit thread that gave me this idea and I guess I am one of the few posters this annoyed though oddly enough I thought you were one of the others back when you were ‘just’ a really bright and knowledgeable science poster and not a mod.
Jim (Please note there was no sarcasm or hidden meanings in my post.)
No offense, but do you have some reading comprehension issues? Right there in the post you were responding to, he says:
One of you does and I don’t think it’s jim. He is just clarifying what he admits was a misconception not continuing to argue…
So, that makes two of you, then.
I guess I do but my reading from the complete post is that they don’t want to enforce the rule that much.
I think the problem with parsing is that it often loses the overall message.
My reading of it is that it’s not so much an issue of wanting to enforce it, it’s one of it not being reported all that frequently. Not to speak for Colibri, of course, but I suspect if there were more reports in the future, there would subsequently be more enforcement.
This is more in the nature of a request rather than a rigorously enforced rule. We do sometimes issue a moderator note if someone violates this. It’s not something that is as serious as insults, political jabs, or other posts that are likely to derail threads. But I agree it is obnoxious and we would prefer that people not do it. We also ask that people not make a lot of “me too!” posts in GQ, but that as well is unlikely to garner an individual caution.
Oh, it absolutely annoys me a great deal. But it would be a Sisyphean (or perhaps better, Augean) task to try to bring it under control. I wish people wouldn’t do it. I also wish they would read the rules and the FAQ before posting, and check Google and the archives before asking as simple question. But that ain’t gonna happen either.
True. I don’t see all that many reports.
Personally, I would be more likely to issue a note for that if I happened to catch it right at the beginning of a thread. If I don’t see something like that until a thread has been running awhile, I’m less likely to step in to deal with what is a fairly minor offense.
I think I understand and I’m glad I remembered correctly on you.
I don’t think there’s quite as much shit in GQ as this comment might imply.
Certainly not as deep as in GD.
I appreciate the reasoned responses. It appears the consensus is that Google boy does do the annoying “me-first” Google thing, but not perhaps to the degree I accused him of. (I think Cliff Clavin is the most fitting description.) I can accept that, and hope he does too – and curbs his behavior accordingly.
Unless they’ve changed the meaning of the word “consensus,” it appears this way only in your mind.
So you get pitted for cyber-stalking Q.E.D. around the forums, and get yourself fucking owned in this thread, and Q.E.D. needs to curb his behaviour.
…
Unless I’m being whooshed, you’ve raised the douchebar pretty high.
Reality is just an abstract concept to some people.
You humans are so funny sometimes.