As someone else suggested, I’d love to know more about what threads prompted all of this. I may not keep up with every single Pit thread, but this really seemed to come out of nowhere. If the outbreaks you describe happen “fairly rarely”, it seems like they would be easier to deal with piecemeal than to make a new, blanket, wildly unpopular rule.
One of the things attracted me to the SDMB way back when was the fine line between civility and anarchy straddled by the Pit–it allowed for rough-and-tumble arguments and invective without the harsh tone and infantile scratchings you get in a completely unmoderated forum. The “free-for-all” weekend gave me a new appreciation for that line; I know some posters preferred it that way, but I thought it reduced the signal-to-noise ratio significantly.
The trick to maintaining that line, IMO, is that it has mostly been allowed to find itself, based on what the community wants. If modding gets too harsh, too lax, or too capricious, the community speaks up, and balance is restored. This is only possible when you have good moderators and loose rules. Now you’re tightening up the rules, and in the process you’ve run off some very good moderators. Should we be surprised that this will result in something other than what the community wants?
And worse yet, we don’t really even know what the impetus was behind it.
I’m not going to say I’ll stop posting here; I’ll be a member here as long as it’s around. I know boards evolve over time. And I don’t think it’s the death knell that others seem to think it is. But it’s a push in a direction that the Board doesn’t want to go, and I don’t think it will end up being good for it.