OK, there are several parts to the question as I see it. I shall take each in turn.
- Did grienspace deserve a slap upside the head?
Yes. He had been on a “mod-kick” for a while, complaining when his moderator thread in MPSIMS caught heat for being in the wrong forum, and repeating the complaint elsewhere. Add that to his admission that he was trolling, and this is pretty clearly a guy who didn’t care for our rules and needed to be reminded in no uncertain terms that intentionally mis-posting a thread is a bunch of work we just don’t need and an insult to every other member of the boards. When he responded to the question “what is the point of your question” with that “what if Hitler’s mom had an abortion” stuff and started ruminating about how history would have been different if the entire rest of the universe didn’t exist, it became clear to me that this was yet another instance of him not caring whether he followed our rules.
2) Did I slap him too hard?
Yeah, probably. I intended to slap him pretty good, but the reaction here seems to indicate that I might have thrown a punch, not a slap. ::shrug:: All I can do is the best I can. I didn’t come down hard enough on dippymonger, and now some huge portion of the continent of Australia is unable to post to the boards until we track that guy down and get him tossed from his ISP. We didn’t slap Jack Dean Tyler hard enough and got an emailed virus for our trouble. We’re all just doing our best here, and sometimes we do too little or not enough. I can’t promise perfection, just my best.
3) Did I threaten his wife’s internet access?
On this one I plead not guilty. When I sent the email to him, I simply picked up an old email he had previously sent to my moderator account and hit “reply.” If he is using his wife’s email account without her knowledge or permission, I suggest that perhaps the problem, if any, lies beyond the scope of this board.
4) Should I tone it down somewhat in GQ?
Actually, yes I should, at least sometimes. Most of my admonitions are pretty mild, but from time to time I come down on somebody pretty hard. When I do that, there is a specific reason. The two most common reasons are because the infraction is particularly grievous or because the offender is repeating something for which s/he has been warned before. I’ve lowered the threshold recently at which I come down hard, simply because the increased traffic in GQ means that an improperly placed thread drops a legitimate GQ thread off the front page (in under two hours during peak periods), harming our good members. The simple fact is that the forum can no longer afford intentional repeat offenders.
Unfortunately, what I sometimes forget is that the target of my admonition and I are not the only people reading my post. In the future, I should either tone down my remarks or make specific reference to the reason I am coming down so hard in a particular case.
