Shush!
Oakminster: active on a message board that’s been stifling him since June 2006. (By the way- wow, this is an old message board!) 
That’s the problem. You can’t arbitrarily and capriciously decide, with no warning or predictability, that one thread will be moderated differently than all the other similar threads. You attempted to impose an “everybody play nice” rule in one particular thread, sua sponte. Worse, you did it by jumping on a political opponent, which leaves you open to claims of bias. You should never do that. It’s bad policy, and blows up in your face.
Nah, I know Sue, and she’s not particularly spontaneous.
Isn’t this phrasing a little disingenuous? By “a political opponent” you meant yourself, and by “claims of bias,” you meant claims that were brought and primarily argued by you. Of course in the same post I also moderated someone who called an anti-gun control argument “stupid” later in the thread I modded other posters who made derogatory comments about gun owners or opponents of gun control. If that’s not enough to forestall claims of bias by “political opponents,” what is?
Moderating “stupid” from one side of the debate cannot be compared to moderating “gun grabbers” from the other. They’re not in the same universe. The other examples you allude to, you’ll have to share.
Why not? He called the post stupid, not the poster.
OK, let’s pretend I never typed that line. Assume I said only this:
Respond to that, please.
You’re wrong. We can and do indeed moderate specific threads in an individualized way based on the course of the discussion itself. We don’t do it all the time because it’s not often necessary and when we do it we often get complaints like ‘Why are you banning this word or that word?’ or ‘Why can’t we talk about this?’ (if we’ve shut down a hijack, for instance) from people who interpret thread-specific instructions in very general ways - which in this case was encouraged by the way I worded my note. But we do this when we feel it’s necessary.
So you know it doesn’t work, but you keep doing it? That’s insane. Why did you feel it was necessary to treat this one thread any differently than the umpteen other threads on the same topic?
I never said it doesn’t work. I said sometimes it requires additional explanation - moreso in this case because of my inexact wording.
Because I felt it might make a difference because the thread was in its early stages. In point of fact it didn’t, but it was worth a shot.
I’ll repeat a suggestion I made years ago: if someone is just edging over the line, rather than leaping over it, a great response would be to ban them from the thread. That thread, IIRC, had some really interesting conversation in it; I was talking with JXJohns and Algher, both of whom I disagree with on the issue of gun registration, and our conversation was respectful and cited, and we were all responding to each other’s points, and it was what I’d love to have more of in GD.
If a bunch of people are using the thread to blow raspberries at one another, I see no reason to give them a second chance: banning them from the thread would reduce its length and drastically increase the thread’s signal-to-noise ratio. It might also act as an object lesson to other posters: if you want to stay in that thread, keep it respectful. It might even act as an object lesson to the raspberry-blowers.
This is a reasonable proposal.
However, the way that it would end up being implemented is mostly the conservative posters would be the ones getting banned from threads.
Moving in this direction, you might as well just skip this intermediate step and go straight the Democratic Underground approach: Inform up front that only Progressive viewpoints are welcome and ban all posters at the first sight of conservative thought.
That’s the way the board is heading.
I’ve used that tactic in a relatively small number of threads, and I do like it.
Funny simul-post.
It was a rebuttal, not a simulpost: I’ve used the tactic that worried you and I don’t think we’re any more doomed or horrible than we were a year or two ago. I probably don’t use that instruction as often as Left Hand of Dorkness would like, since I only use it for people who are not only breaking the rules but who don’t seem to be interested in the thread topic in the first place. But in those situations it’s a useful tool, and since we have enough useless tools as it is, having another useful one doesn’t hurt.
Has it ever occurred to you that it isn’t the viewpoint that is being critiqued-it’s the methods used to push the viewpoint?
The problem is that the same methods from the left do not receive the same treatment from the mods. You were a prime example of this when you were a mod, and I called you on it several times.
Ask yourself honestly: If Der Thris and some of our other more obnoxious liberal posters were conservative how long ago would they have been banned?
The legendary SDMB anticonservative pogrom. Forever just around the corner, never quite here.