It’s simple, folks. The bar has been set. If you see a term as harsh as or harsher than “gun grabber” in Great Debates, then simply click that little link to report the post.
Report report report.
Considering how frivolous some of the ATMB threads are I would be very surprised if the report function is not already being spammed with reports about every little thing.
:rolleyes:
I’ve modded both posts. “Motherfucking scumbag” is definitely more appropriate for the Pit than a Great Debates. “Scum” by itself isn’t as bad, but still. And both comments are targeted vaguely and could apply to the leadership of the NRA or everybody in it or (in the case of Der Trihs’ post) everyone who opposes new gun laws, and both are likely to offend people without contributing to the debate.
You were being asked to explain yourself not read some other posters mind. Nice try though.
My explanation is that I don’t need your permission to either ask a question or have a different opinion.
Nobody asked me, but I don’t really see how “gun grabber” is offensive. Maybe well-poisoning, in GQ, but hardly offensive.
Perhaps. Should excessive well-poisoning on either side be moderated, if it tends to be a major blockade to actual debate?
In principle, sure. However, that post was in GD, and as far as I can tell nobody actually reacted to it.
Which brings us back to the question as to whether mods should be proactive or reactive. If a poster does something that is intended to disrupt, should the mods wait until an actual disruption occurs to react to it?
Why do they have to be either proactive or reactive all the time? They can be (and generally are) proactive with regard to actual disruptive stuff, and are generally pretty passive about minor quibbles like this one.
So in the thread linked by Oakminster above Marley says:
So according to Marley vitriol is “A-Ok” as long it’s coupled to something that contributes to the debate.
Yet in post 12 of this thread Marley says:
So Oakminster got modded for tone yet you tell another poster that vitriol is fine as long as it somehow relates to the debate.
So it seems to me that “tone” was not really the reason Oak got modded. Because according to Marley you can be all mean and vitriolic but as long as you tie that to the debate then everything is hunky-dory.
Yes. The conclusion is that not every vitriolic comment is out of bounds in GD. There are limits based on the offensiveness of the characterization and its relevance to the topic.
I didn’t think Oakminster’s post was tied to the debate. I mentioned this upthread: it appeared to me to be a series of attacks on positions nobody had actually taken in the thread. I do see that when Oakminster talked about people being punished, he didn’t mean what I thought he meant. But I don’t think his actual meaning was in any way obvious based on the content of the thread to that point.
This is pretty ridiculous. I think these comments by pkbites prior to Oakminster and Ludovic were more inflammatory that Oak’s “gun grabber” label and Ludovic’s dismissal of pk’s remarks as stupid.
Those are also “overly broad ludicrous comments” that are not advocated by anyone in the thread. Yet he gets a pass on his assertions about the motivations of his opponents.
I understand you trying to preemptively save the tone of the thread. I’m not sure how reasonable it was to hit those labels so early, when similar comments abound in GD and nothing is done about them. But your stated rationale for addressing Oakminster’s comments just doesn’t match reality. Both because pkbites did the same thing and got nothing from you, and because the topic of holding gun owners responsible for crimes committed by people who steal their weapons has been advocated on this board. I was just reading the thread on threadspotting about “my guns fell through the ice” where that was seriously proposed. So Oak didn’t pull that out of thin air, if he did post it in a different thread on the same topic (gun control, which is where that MPSIMS thread went).
I don’t think you were being intentionally biased, but I think you erred on this call. Of course, all you did was say “keep the tone GD worthy”, but really I don’t see where Oak or Ludovic did anything not GD worthy.
I think you make a good point. I went back and reread the thread last night, and the first 15 posts or so contain a lot of garbage. It’s primarily strawman arguments from gun control opponents instead of actual responses to the OP. You could argue that screwed up the discussion more than the words “gun grabber” or Ludovic calling an argument “stupid.”
I just don’t understand why the very basics elude the mods here. When you moderate someone for something that you haven’t moderated others for, or when you’ve ACTUALLY SAID THE SAME THING YOURSELF, it comes across that you are moderating not out of some sense of enforcing rules, but based on people you don’t like. And, surprise, that offends people.
Since you want to make such a big deal about tone, I’ll point out that your tone towards magellan was horrible from the start. And I do not like the precedent of giving posters warning because they refuse to agree with you. Even if you argue that his initial post was wrong, how in the world do you justify disagreeing with your moderation on it to be a Warnable offense? What specifically did he say in those last few posts that was Warnable? There’s no point in Warning anyone if you aren’t going to tell us what he did wrong.
These types of moderating decisions only bolster people like Oakminster who thinks you moderate based on your feelings or biases rather than any desire to actually keep the board on track. According to what you said to me long ago in PM, it is part of a mod’s job to know when to walk away. So walk away. Don’t use your mod powers to win an argument.
Evidently, certain words qualify as Warnable, but it’s a secret list. I’ve presented a list to him several times now and he refuses to answer. Nice little gig he’s got going there.
This heavy-handed pre-emptive moderation is unhelpful in the extreme. I’m still amazed that ha considers “prig” is out of bounds. It’s absurd.
So in the future, can we trust that in abortion threads, any poster who mentions that a pro-life position is nothing but hatred of women, that comment will be moderated as well since no poster in the thread took that position?
How about a thread on the budget deal? If a poster says that Republicans just want to protect their rich friends, will that get a note since nobody in the thread said that?
IOW, is this some new rule that GD threads are only limited to the subject matter discussed in the thread itself with no outside material allowed?
None of this is true.
No. If you have questions about some other insults or the moderation of other comments, please start a new thread. I’m closing this one since it’s been tortured enough.
Oh, my mistake. Can you provide that list again, then? I must have missed it.