It’s hard to unring a bell, and to unestablish a precedent.
I agree with the majority here. The ban makes no sense. We can call someone a goat-felching mother-raper but not a troll. If junior modding is a problem, call the junior modder on it. The current rule creates these strange contortions about people who live beneath bridges and the word that cannot be used. Simpler to allow accusations of trolling plain and simple.
So what? You calling someone a troll doesn’t cause them to be warned or banned.
I’m just not seeing the problem here. If you, a non-mod, calls someone a troll, what does it matter if the mods agree or not? If they don’t agree, they ignore you. If they agree, they warn or ban the person you called a troll. It’s still their call. What problem does your original comment cause?
But precedents can be misconstrued and sometimes even mods make bad decisions. I’m just wary of posters digging up stuff a mod posted five years ago and saying 'Ah-hah! Gotcha! Poster Z was warned for talking about this, and you’re going to get warned too!"
Actually, from the moment I began really reading these boards I found the whole idea of a rule that states you’re not allowed to accuse someone of breaking the rules… more than slightly odd. I don’t think the word “troll” should be taboo; it seems in danger of making things stray to the extremes I’ve seen on a certain other board, where the admins tried to enforce a “don’t call people gay” rule and ended up having to put a taboo on the word “cigarette” as it applies to posters.
In general, rules that ban certain words are rarely enforceable and usually a royal pain in the stalks. I’m for the idea of lifting the word-ban entirely.
Yup. And if you think too many Pit threads get hijacked into pissing matches over irrelevancies now…
I would vote for letting people fling accusations of shit-stirring as they please, though.
About junior modding, askeptic, I perceive two main varieties:
Advising the clueless that there’s a board rule they’ve folded, spindled or mutilated, with the usual polite IANAMod disclaimers;
Whacking someone upside the head with a rulestick with intent to maim.
I’ve done the first now and then and never been warned for it. I’ve seen Dopers warned for the second, and I believe rightfully so. I’d say intent, so far as one can extract it from faceless words and uninflected language, determines what goes over the line.
But then, IANAMod.
Anybody who uses a non-mod’s accusation of trollery as a precedent won’t be making much of a point.
Because it’s one thing to be told by another poster that you’re any shade of an idiot or asshole, it’s quite another to be told that you should be banned. YMMV, of course.
Along with entire bureaucracies!
There’s also the point that if most people see me call someone a babystabbing, bunny butchering child molestor, most reasonable people will assum that there is in fact no stabbing of babies, butchering of bunnies or, in most cases, molesting of children taking place. Also, most people will understand that if I call someone a poo-poo-head, that person does not, in fact, have a head made of poo.
However, if I call someone a troll… everyone is going to assume that a certain amount of trolling taking place. It is the Internet, after all. There be trolls here.
It scares me to say this, but…what luci said. 
Can you elaborate on what you see the difference is? It seems you see something in a trollery accusation I do not. Since there’s no authority behind a non-mod making the accusation, there’s no danger of actually being banned (unless a mod also thinks you are trolling, which is no different from the situation today).
Do you feel it is more hurtful or insulting than being called an idiot or asshole? It’s just too hateful, even for the pit?
If you’re asking for opinions, I am for lifting the rule. It’s the pit. A bit of anarchy is a good thing.
I too would like to see the “no joke threads in the Pit” rule relaxed. When I first found the SDMB, the Pit was frequently a place of breath-takingly brilliant humor. I wanted to be like these posters. The thread that caused me to sign up was Pandas can f*** off. The thread doesn’t work outside of the Pit.
Part of the bite of these joke threads is that they appear in the Pit. While The horror of blimps wouldn’t have suffered much from being moved, something like I really hate the Amish just wouldn’t be funny in MPSIMS.
Well, of course a mere non-mod claiming that you’ll get banned doesn’t mean you will.
And to put all my cards on the table, there is another message board I posted on (which I will not name, dontcha know), where this shit really got out of hand. You could hardly get through a single thread without at least one idiot jumping in to say “You’re breaking the rules!” or “You’re going to get banned for that!”
I don’t think it’s too hateful for the pit, I think it’s too fucking annoying and would bring the community down as a whole. We have mods, they do a very good job (that’ll be $20.00 to may paypal account Giraffe). I think it really is best that if any rule breaking goes on, it gets reported and then a mod deal with it, rather than having posters biting at each other’s ankles.
Damnit, I can’t even get a joke right. ~le sigh~
Forget the twenty bucks, I’ll just go sulk in a corner.
I’ll echo the above in that I think the ban on accusing someone as a troll is silly. It’s a perfectly legitimate accusation, and if people start abusing the accusation, they’ll probably be told to pipe down by those without an axe to grind.
Oh I don’t know. If **Rewindforward ** said it, I doubt it would have much effect. If credible Dopers said it then it might lead to a valuable discussion as to the veracity of the claim. In the end we might all be a little less ignorant.
I also demand a ban on appeals to the poor poor hampsters and a ban on claims that this place is only about fighting ignorance. Maybe Cecil does that and we do occasionally but damn that is not all we do around here.
I agree with elucidator. Fuck rules.
But we are here to fight ignorance, we are not, outside of the mods, here to mod the community.
As a longtime reader of PIt threads, I think the rule should stay in place. I have seen perfectly good GD threads devolveinto perfectly good Pit threads, and then to really awful threads with two posters accusing each other violating the rules, while their friends/allies/enemies chime in with their opinions on the rules. It almost always starts with an accusation of trolling, IIRC. The point at which junior modding becomes annoying is the point at whch the post appears on the board. If it takes excising one word from the acceptable vocabulary to prevent the return of
then it is well worth it.