There’s an anti-Cindy Sheehan pile-on going on in MPSIMS. Lot’s on insulting comments on her supposed mental state. I thought this sort of stuff wasn’t allowed there.
It’s much more appropriate – and bound to be faster to get action – if instead of making a post here you look at the post you consider inappropriate and click on the “Report Bad Post” icon.
This shoots an email to the moderators of the affected area and takes them directly to the problem. Instead, you force me to go over and look at a thread with a bunch of responses already and THEN refer it to the moderators, which could have been done a couple of hours ago instead of sitting here waiting on me to get to it.
Just saying here.
I’ll let the MPSIMS mods know what’s going on so they can investigate.
TubaDiva
I’m sorry you misunderstood why I posted like this.
(It is true that I am quite hesitant to “report” a post. It seems like 99% of the time someone else quickly noticed it and things get taken care of. E.g., the usual P2P threads. I have only done one “report” that I can remember in a long time. I noticed that nothing had been done about it after a seemingly long time and indeed it hadn’t been brought to Dex’s attention. He did a fine job in responding to me BTW.)
But this particular thread has been going on for some time (and still is). Plus there are multiple people posting what I thought was against the rules.
Ergo, what I decided to ask in a public forum for the purposes of discussion what the deal is here?
I have been around here some time. I know how to report a post. I thought I knew what the rules are. If I am mistaken about that thread, please explain. But I would also like to publicly post followups explaining why then maybe some rules could be modified so such threads won’t happen in the future.
Also, a key reason I wanted to bring this to broad attention: People are defaming Cindy Sheehan and one poster even admits he/she knows it is false.
One has to wonder what the legal repurcusions of such posts could be to the SDMB and the CR. IANAL and all, so I’d like to read what others think about that aspect as well.
Keep in mind that Cindy Sheehan would likely qualify as a public figure now, and therefore the bar for defamation is much, much higher than if it was you or I being defamed.
As I understand the rule, it forbids insulting other posters in any forum except The Pit. I don’t think there’s a general rule about not insulting public figures.
How many times have you seen something like “XYZ band sucks!” or “(insert name) can’t act their way out of a paper bag” in CS?
That was my understanding as well. Seems quite a stretch to imply that the no insults rule applies to public figures. That would require a major board overhaul, and I can’t quite comprehend how an established poster could lose sight of such an obvious distinction.
Not to mention that most established posters would have read this once or twice:
Generally speaking, yes. Our concern is what y’all say about/to each other, not what you say about public figures. Certainly, in Cafe Society, we have posters tearing the hell outta actors, singers, film directors, etc. No way that we’d say you have to be polite to them.
We do have a minor but confusing issue when a poster has (say) a published work, and then we have to draw the imaginary line to separate the person’s different identities.
In any case, attacking public figures (Lord knows, look how politicians get attacked) is not considered out of bounds, in general. There are exceptions, like death threats, say, which are not permitted under any circumstances.
“About This Message Board
For technical questions and concerns about the SDMB. This is also the place for practice posts.”
Anyway, now that’s out of the way.
I guess I just don’t get the subtlety of certain rules.
E.g., there have been threads about certain Personal Practices and Scandals of celebs that have been closed due to worries about lawsuits.
I also take note between stating opinion and making libelous statments.
E.g., “Deline Ceylon is the worst singer ever.” vs. “Deline Ceylon is a pedophile.” (when the writer knows it’s not true). Famous or not, posting known untrue bad things has me worried.
Plus there’s the thing about a political rant thread in MPSIMS, which is of minor concern to me. (Unless this indicates a variation based on who you are ranting against. E.g., a Meiers thread, OTOH, was recently moved.)
On re-read, my last post was snarkier than I meant it to be. Sorry about that.
I have to ask for a cite on that-I don’t ever recall anything like that.
Off the top of my head, there was a sticky in CS about Ulrika Jonsson 3 years ago. There was a spate of such shutdowns around the time, which slowed down (I assumed) since people Caught On.
Since a noticable fraction (but clearly not all, I appreciate Dex’s response most of all) of people have misunderstood the issue I was raising, I don’t want to have more people spend time providing responses that turn out to be not addressing my concerns. I will ask that this thread be closed.
Apparently, there is a lot of “up do the moderators” stuff going on here, which I agree would be debated in The Pit (which I do not visit). So that’s that.