I must interject the serious discussion here to point out that the choice of thread title has an interesting side effect. In the “Sub-Forums: Main” view, this thread appears as “Jonathan Chance’s warning of…” with the name of the last poster in the thread immediately underneath. At a glance, it appears that the named poster was the one being warned.
So far, as this thread has progressed, to a casual observer not looking carefully it appears that within the past three days, Jonathan Chance, in a burst of concerted zealotry, has warned about half the posters on this entire board, and all of them are complaining about it!
As another topical aside to lighten the mood, I see that there was a recent AI competition using a newly developed test instead of the Turing test. The Winograd Schema Challenge involves constructing sentences containing pronouns with deliberately ambiguous referents, and asking the AI to parse them! The bottom line: chatbots aren’t very smart yet.
I have made this point multiple times on this board over the years and I agree with it still. I submit after the warning was rescinded you could have simply said this as a suggestion for the future and refrained from any editorializing about carelessness, who’s fault anything was, or sloppiness. Same point and a more palatable message. Compare a response to the warning being rescinded:
[ol]
[li]Hey there, thanks for reconsidering. In the future could I suggest interpreting someone’s message charitably prior to issuing warnings? It may help to avoid unnecessary conflict.[/li][li]Good. Next time you shouldn’t be so careless in your interpretation and sloppily read what people write. That’s all on you as I was totally right and didn’t break any rules. You should have given me the benefit of the doubt and re-read what I wrote. You didn’t and that really should be considered not living up to the requirements of your position.[/li][/ol]
To be clear, in my own view as a mod, your post did technically violate the rule against altering quotes in the attributed text box. The insertion you made into the brackets was not appropriate, and constituted editorializing. Technically it was a warnable offense. However, since it was not done with malicious intent, it was appropriate that you receive only a note for it rather than a warning.
I suppose this will prompt several more pages of quibbling and hairsplitting about the nuances of the rule, style guides, editorial practice, and so forth. However, all this could be avoided by simply using the multiquote feature.
This is a little surprising. But yes, I’d certainly like an explanation of why a verbatim statement of an unambiguous referent in square brackets “constituted editorializing”, and why “Technically it was a warnable offense.” Not to quibble or hairsplit, but because we all quote prior comments constantly, and I want to know what the rules are and how they are going to be applied.
ETA: and rather than a general discussion, I’m more concerned about knowing the mod consensus on exactly what you all think the rule is, please.
I use the multiquote feature. But I also use brackets. Brackets are explicitly permitted in the TOS. The downside of the multiquote feature is that is encourages tit for tat style argument. You don’t see that a lot in GQ. But it’s standard in the Pit, GD and elections. The problem with that sort of conversational approach is that it can be difficult to trace the conversation after a couple of rounds. And you lose your third party audience, as LHoD pointed out.
Better practice is to try to step back and discuss the central issues. Because nothing gets settled here. All we can really do is tease out some main arguments. Hopefully most of them.
So much for background. Now brackets are expressly permitted in the TOS. Moving forward, should I try to evade the use of brackets when their content can be reasonably interpreted as disparaging to either poster, ideology, political party, public personality or whomever? Is that interpretation narrower or broader than what you had in mind? Or is that basically it?
These are real questions. I’m not trying to pin you down. If you want you can frame it as best practice. But I perceive that your comment goes beyond that. I understand that the multiquote addresses certain problems. But it creates others. I probably use multiquote more than brackets. But eliminating the use of brackets entirely would not be conducive to fighting ignorance in my opinion.
You do realize that the mods are volunteers and are not funded by your money?
You are asking for an impossible, that no mistakes ever happen.
The damn warning was rescinded. Continuing to whine about it and lecturing the mods does not present you in a favorable light.
There were 20 some odd posts between your and the one you quoted, and while your life may revolved around that particular thread, it’s absurd to assume that everyone is going to be on top of every single detail that you are.
If you feel that you don’t want to multiquote simply because it doesn’t look as good, you need to remember that clarity is the major goal of writing. Looking pretty ain’t as nice as unambiguity.
This could also have been handled by you clarifying after the quote in a note.
This is perhaps true. I was pretty irritated by the whole thing, and let that reflect my post. Your advice is undoubtedly wiser.
This, however, is incorrect. I’m not asking that mistakes never happen. I’m asking that mods make real sure that a post deserves a warning (not a mod note, nor even benign neglect) before issuing that warning. Mistakes will happen, of course, but should happen less often.
Are you sure you understand what the multi-quote function is? What you are describing almost always happens with a single quote that is chopped into a dozen or so pieces, with a response given to each piece (of the same post). The multi-quote function allows you to respond to two different posters in the same quote. That doesn’t necessarily have the same problem in general, but more importantly in the case we are discussing poses no problem at all producing a “tit for tat” exchange since it will produce exactly two pieces, no more.
I know we discussed this in a PM, but your post here added more info and made me wonder if we were talking about different things.
I’ll go on record as saying that Moderator Chance was 100% wrong. Note that LHOD even stated (redundantly since “[ … ]” interpolations are assumed to be added) “clarification added.”
“Nested quote” is the better, clearer method, and no, the administrator in charge of configuring SDMB’s software has concluded we’re not adult enough to handle that, unless we take the trouble to do it manually.
I’ll stipulate that my post in question was over-snarky but I wasn’t warned for that. I was warned for apparently positing a linkage between A and B. (I’ll leave A and B unspecified here, since I’ve already been warned for putting these phrases into the same quote box.)
TL;DR: Be very careful with your quote boxes, people!
What I want is a change in moderator action going forward. If Chance writes something like, “I did moderate that too quickly, and going forward I’ll try to do a better job of rereading a post carefully to be sure I understand it before I put on my mod hat,” THEN I’ll have gotten what I want.
If you think all I wanted was to have the warning rescinded, I understand why you’re confused at my continued posts in this thread :).
Let me clarify. Multiquote would have been better in this case, given 50-50 hindsight, IMHO.* (I agree with the downside mentioned by LHoD in this case, but I think it’s pretty small.)
You are correct that multiquoting and quote chopping have the same disadvantage. The disadvantage applies less in this case - but the subject had turned to best practices. And IMHO, sometimes it’s best practice to use multiquote and sometime brackets are preferable.
After the first quote box, you start to lose your audience. Two quote boxes are probably ok though. And to be clear 20 quote boxes are ok too - but posters should recognize that they tend to glaze over eyes.
Now I don’t think I use brackets that often - in fact I’m guessing most people here don’t use them often. But I have found them useful in the past, though I can’t recall any specific examples. I could adapt to an outright ban (which nobody is calling for) but it would require adjustment and IMO hinder the fight against ignorance by a degree.
Not because I had any problem whatsoever with the post. But because others did. Roughly speaking, I care very little if one poster has a problem with my post. Because individuals are idiosyncratic. But when 2 posters have a problem (while, say, 8 do not), I have a potential communication issue.
septimus: Clicking your link, when you chop and puree a poster’s remarks and he berates you for strawmanning, best practice IMHO is to apologize and move on. That said and irrelevantly, thanks for doing the yeoman’s work so I don’t have to.
I think this right here is what is frustrating people. He didn’t paraphrase. He didn’t put it in different words. He literally lifted the grammatical antecedent. It is exactly the same as replacing “her dog” with “[the sister’s] dog”. Would you call that a paraphrase? Would you really go for multi-quotes to avoid that construction?
