Today I received one of the funniest PM I have ever gotten in all my years here at the Dope.
Yesterday I had an exchange with a fellow Doper. Well, I guess he didn’t like what I had to say because today I got a PM from him.
In the title it read: “Hello, I think we got started off on the wrong foot”
And then when I clicked on the PM, the body read: “Fuck you! And welcome to my ignore list! :D”
For his sake, I sincerely hope this guy was kidding. Because, if serious, that’s both kind of sad and funny. Especially when you consider the exchange itself, wasn’t really all that bad.
Anyway, whether it’s against the rules or not, I have no intention of reporting him. I’m just curious if the PM is a violation.
I will if you can promise me the person in question will not get a warning. As I said, I don’t wish to turn the person in. I’m just asking out of curiosity.
“Since they are treated as postings, the rules of conduct for private messages are the same as those of the general forums of the Straight Dope Message Board, starting, but not ending, with our most basic rule: Don’t be a jerk.”
So yes, it would be a violation of board rules and therefore warnable.
The OP does not wish to report this particular PM, but just to remind everyone, if you have an issue with a PM, you can report the PM similarly to the way that you report a post. PM reports don’t go to a specific moderator, but they are checked periodically.
It’s not that hard to figure out who it is, you know. Just sayin’.
I would also like to state that I, personally, would treat PMs like The Pit, and run them by much looser rules except in the case of stalking or on-going harassment. Telling another poster “Fuck you!” in a PM isn’t going to affect the decorum of this august salon in the least.
Meh, I like things the way they are. The two things I think might be useful is being able to politely inform someone they are on your ignore list (to avoid wasting time talking to you), and to be able to warn someone that you think the person they are talking to is probably a troll, without posting in the Pit and giving the troll attention.
We take these on a case-by-case basis. If someone sends a PM based on an argument that happened in the Pit, then obviously we’ll take into consideration that this was something most likely sent in anger. On the other hand, saying the same type of F-you PM just out of the blue without any circumstances behind it will be looked on differently and would likely be modded more strictly.
We don’t get too many PM reports, and the ones that we do get tend to be for things like threats or someone socking up after being banned just so they can send a nasty PM to someone.
You don’t have to worry about us clamping down on things said in PMs. We’re not going to throw the book at you for making a political jab in a PM regarding a GQ thread or anything like that.
Only if we could also use the ignore button for PMs. I’ve never used the ignore option on anyone, so maybe it already works that way-- I wouldn’t know. Otherwise, we’d have endless flame wars in the PM-verse.
