A better description would be:
The Mod reminded him of the rules, but apparently didn’t feel a formal warning was necessary.
If there was any figurative shoulder shrugging, I didn’t note it.
I’d say there was, figuratively speaking, a long look and a raised index finger. And
I’d bet money that if the poster repeated the offense within a day or two there would be a warning.
There are two approaches to Moderating a forum such as Great Debates where conflict and passion are part and parcel of the discussion:
= An approach in which some set of rules is extensively listed, infractions are doled out according to whether one has crossed the line with a particular word or phrase, and the barracks lawyers spend hours arguing that their word was not a violation because the rule is expressed in the infinitve and they posted the participle.
= An approach in which there are a few very clear rules, beyond which the Mod attempts to keep the discussion from deteriorating into pissing contests and trainwrecks by simply insisting on a particular level of (restrained) civility.
Beyond that, the rules or the Moderator approaches to other fora are liable to differ, based on the purpose of each forum so that the rules are necessarily much tighter in General Questions and much looser in the BBQ Pit with other fora having standards more appropriate to their purposes.
To the chagrin of the barracks lawyers, I employ the second method, not the first. Pointing to an example of one instance of moderating in Great Debates may or may not actually have any bearing on the proper enforcement of Moderation in another forum. In the instance cited, I had already directed all the participants to refrain from making personal comments, so regardless whether any particular phrase was a rule violation, the tenor of the post referenced violated my express instructions. I do not see any ambiguity in my post in the context of the entire series of posts.
LOL! 
That is just sooooo picturable.
I’m not a barracks lawyer and I’m not criticizing your moderation of that thread. I stated clearly (I thought) that it was an official intervention discouraging the sort of comment that preceded it. But this
is a fair description of this:
“It may be a rule violation, but it may not be” is a close paraphrase of “your comments in post #107 may not, technically, be over the line in GD, (although it would be a close call),” and is a mixed signal to anyone trying to establish a clear bright line. If you feel that ambiguity is better than clear bright lines you may well be right, but then there’s no reason to pretend it doesn’t exist.
Exactly.
Now, I wonder if Dex will come back to this thread.
Both of his statements about uneven moderation do not apply to the post I quoted.
There was no fuzzy line, saying you want to “garrotte a poster with their own intestines” clearly violates a long-time rule against wishing harm.
The mods weren’t aware of it, because nobody reported it. The Mod in this case was aware of it, and responded, but shrugged and said “no warning”.
That’s uneven moderation. But since the attack was against curlcoat, Dex doesn’t see the problem.
I keep mixing up Dex with Arnold Winkelried. I can’t remember who’s the cool one. One of them couldn’t take his own joke when it was quoted back to him verbatim. He gave me a warning, in fact. The other published a little story I wrote in some kind of online magazine. One you have to be real careful with, act contrite, and suck up to, like if you want your suspension lifted. The other one just shrugs and fixes it. Maybe I’d be careful just in case.
I doubt that we are going to find a bright line in the text cited. There is enough inherent ambiguity in the English language that a judgment one way or the other would be met with cries of “NO IT’S NOT” from more than one poster. I would say that a mixed signal would be treating identical posts differently, (and I will not claim that does not happen), whereas the post in question and my response actually reduces the “mixture” in that instance by clearly declaring it out of bounds, regardless whether it has a bright line to determine it.
Oh, please. First, how would I “see the problem” before you mentioned it?
Now, to state the obvious:
(1) The example you cite was in the Pit, where insults are permitted but not death threats. The particular instance was such an over-the-top joke that Gfactor did not think an Official Warning was merited. If he HAD issued an Official Warning, the outcry would have been massive, with complaints of jackboots and “unable to take a joke.” He did, however, issue a “cool it.”
(2) My “list” above about reasons for uneven moderation was NOT an exclusive list, just two samples. There are lots of reasons for seemingly uneven moderation – didn’t I use the traffic cop example? – which can depend on context, on forum, on the time elapsed since the infringement was reported, and often on what else is going on behind the scenes (e.g., we’ve had situations where we know that a person is having severe psychological problems and we sometimes extend a little leniency until the meds get straight.) It can depend on what else is going on at the time, it can depend on the person’s past history, there’s a zillion reasons that situation A is different from situation B. None of those reasons has to do with WHO a person is, but they can have to do with that person’s history of misbehaviors (or lack thereof.)
As tomndebb says, we do NOT moderate here by having a massive list of rules and subrules. We do not try to say that you’ve violated Rule 18(b)(iii.) We try to keep rules minimal and general, and that means, yes, there will be some uneven application. Hell, the US Federal Code is how many volumes? And how many years of precedents? And there’s still uneven application from time to time.
I’ve now responded once in this thread to your baiting me (by making ridiculous statements to which the answers are obvious), I shan’t do it again.
Okay. Now I’ve got it straight.
Compared to what?
Since you asked, you just were too abrasive in general. Don’t have to spit directly in someone’s eye for him to take it personally.