Why don’t you two just take it to the pit for cryin’ out … oh. Right. Never mind, then.
Oh, is the SDMB getting money from the government Stimulus Package as long as they follow FCC guidelines?
I guess George Carlin couldn’t post here (death aside).
Ed,
Here in this thread we have Giraffe’s post asking for clarity on your new standard:
Followed by your response:
Now here, where this new rule might actually come into play, we have koufax responding to Q.E.D. with:
Followed by your ruling that this is:
So, first we have you telling us that “off-hand” calling another poster an asshole is banned under this new standard, and yet, you turn around two days later and say that calling another poster an asshole is “not a problem.”
Which is it? Or do you even know?
Has it sunk in yet? Or should I repeat it more slowly? Perhaps I could have Gov. Jindal read it to you during story time?
You, the man who wrote these new standards, can’t even apply them consistently and it’s been less than a week.
Is the bulb beginning to flicker… Are you beginning to see where the posters may have a few problems with this rule?
He’s my brother. Yep, IRL, for reals, he’s blood. He’s known me all his life so he’s pretty good at knowing my mind and representing at least a recognizable simulacrum of my position. Not that you’d know this, of course. Just, y’know, FYI and stuff.
However, on this particular issue, for the record, I’m pretty sure that he’s remembering my interaction with Sapo (who was definitely going out of his way to tweak the administration) and confusing the vaguely-similar-though-not-really usernames. Just a guess.
How about this: instead of trying to list and define exactly what we can and cannot do in the Pit now, we just try it out and everyone gets three or so free warnings for a few months that don’t go on their record until we get used to it.
Perhaps Ed & the mods could pop in once in awhile and point out things they like, and examples of what they don’t like.
Of course, that would make me feel like I’m being trained for an unpaid position of content provider, but I guess we kinda are already.
Actually, i don’t think there’s going to be any “slowly edge” about it, at least not in my case.
I’ve decided that my respnse to all this is that i’m going to try to post in the Pit pretty much the same way that i’ve always posted. Because it has been made so unequivocally clear that calling another Doper a cunt is unacceptable, i will not do that (i’ve only done it 3 times in 13,000 posts anyway). But apart from that, i’m going to do what i’ve always done, and let the chips fall where they may. If it leads to my bannination, then i’ll just have to live with that.
As Fuzzy Wombats’ recent post shows, not only is the new system so vague as to be useless, but even when it’s being implemented by a single person there is no consistency. In the absence of any comprehensible standard, apart from thew absolute ban on calling other people cunts, i’m just going to carry on as normal.
I’ve been staying out of this insanity, but I wanted to vote in ntucker’s poll.
sNUgglypuPPy
Oh well, while I’m here:
matt_mcl and Green Bean have really already said pretty much everything I would say about Rule #2. I started lurking in high school, around 2000 or so, so I’ve seen a lot of history but haven’t participated. It’s to be expected that things change, and I’ve gotten a lot of enjoyment out of reading stories, rants, and debates over the years, but I think that the changes of the past few months are a sign that it’s heading in a different direction. End of an era, kind of sad. Whatever. I probably wouldn’t even bother voting or posting if the dismissive condescension hadn’t finally gotten on my last nerve.
People aren’t just throwing tantrums because they can’t call each other “cunts” any more. And yes, if that’s really what you’re getting from these complaints, Ed, you come across as either condescending, dismissive, or both. It’s the principle. We think that the tone wasn’t that bad before, and we’ve been around for years contributing to the community and consuming the service you provide. If someone got out of line, or if someone was horribly “abusive” in the past, they were dealt with by the person insulted, by the mods, and by everyone else posting to the BBQ Pit thread. We are the community you are trying to raise the tone of. It’s not like you just started a message board and laid down these rules from the get-go. Many members feel that this rule will change the community that they have been a part of for years, and they don’t like that.
Yes, it’s your property. Yes, you can do with it what you will, and we can go pound sand. The tone I’m getting from the admins who back this change is that they are under the impression that this is analogous to, say, a guest coming over to your house and lighting up a cigarette without asking. Eventually, when the guest lights another, you tell them not to do it any more because you’ve reached the end of your patience. It seems to me that it’s more like my landlord told me I had to take down my red curtains because he thinks they’re trashy, and added a new clause to my lease that I could only have white plastic blinds–and if I don’t sign the new clause, well, I go somewhere else.
Rule #1 is great, by the way, and long overdue, IMO.
Rule #5 is kind of pointless.
missed the edit window:
ETA: If all you’re really trying to establish is “you can’t call another user a cunt” (or other specific goals) why the vague wording? I really doubt that everyone would be mad if that were the new rule, or even if the new rule was something like “You can’t specifically use certain vulgar insults toward other posters. Examples: (examples). We want to stop really egregious name calling, like in this situation: (link to example thread).” Arguing that people are all up in arms because they can’t call someone else a cunt is actually more than dismissive and condescending–it’s blindly ignoring pages and pages of posts carefully explaining otherwise.
Apparently the offending thread(s) are so vile (channeling Animal House) that modesty and decorum prohibit their linking here.
Let’s see what they do.
sNUGGLYPUPPY
When does the results page get put in place?
Pfft. This is the place where I learned about goatse and felching. And, interestingly, the phrase “goat felching.” (…and lolcats.)
It’s also the place where I learned about polyamory, the definition of “ad hominem,” Jean-Marie Le Pen (damn, dude…he’s…really a Nazi…), prolapsed uteri, and Margaret Atwood.
Maybe that’s the best way to explain it. There’s something great about a place where you can get conversations about feminism, angry political rants, horrified discussions of medical issues that are actually informative, a great recipe for tilapia, an intelligent discussion of GTA IV, and phrases like goat felching–all in the same place–and the wording of the new rule allows for the Pit to be watered down beyond the scope of the original creator’s apparent intent.
Oh don’t get me wrong. I participated in many of the really ugly vintage pit threads, t’aint me who’s having the vapors.
To echo beanpod a little… No, this is not what anyone is asking for. What people are asking for is the freedom to call each other “asshole,” which you’ve explicitly said is not allowed (a decision, I might add, that is so questionable that even you can’t stick to it), and a variety of other fairly middle-of-the-road insults.
See, you’ve picked “cunt” as your favorite example because it allows you to portray those that disagree with you as unreasonable, uncompromising foul-mouths who just want to shout the most offensive words possible. But this is disingenuous. I don’t think I’ve heard from anyone on this thread that would say that losing that particular insult is a deal-breaker.
I think most of us can accept that you’re going to have to make a subjective threshold of what constitutes “abuse.” We’re just disagreeing on just how namby pamby that threshold should be. I bet if you just said “insults that we consider too abusive will not be tolerated. What’s ‘too abusive’ is up to the mods. End of story.” and didn’t give any examples, you’d probably get a hell of a lot less flack than you did by letting on that you consider “asshole” to be “too abusive.” That’s when people go, “hey wait a minute, that’s ridiculous. What’s your goddamn standard here, anyway?”
And I completely agree with the sentiment that you didn’t even need a new rule for this, no matter where you draw the line. All you have to do is empower the mods to say “Warning: your insults have crossed the line into abuse and that constitutes Being A Jerk” on a case by case basis, and you’re good to go. No need to draw up a confusing and contradictory list of examples. My guess is almost everyone who’s up in arms about this can look at your ridiculous list of examples and find at least one thing that they don’t think is particularly nasty, and that makes them worry that they have no idea what the standard is.
I think the revised rules sound perfectly reasonable. I suppose that makes me either a pussy or a suckup, but all of the gloom and doom and Aux barricades! posts in this and other threads make their posters sound like petulant children. We are supposed to be adults here. There should be a reasonable expectation we ACT like adults, even when we are angry.
Now wait a minute. Can’t “Go to hell” be viewed as wishing death on another poster? Since, you know, if you believe in hell, then you have to be dead to go there in the first place. Or for hell, can you substitute the Sonoran desert in southwestern Arizona? 
Are you like the protective uncle who’s come over to Ed’s sandpit to sort out the squabbling?
Oh, I got it. 
Sorry for the confusion–I actually phrased it that way because I was amused by your joke. I’m kind of hard to understand sometimes…
You had me at “amused by my joke”
dropzone you’re (obviously) entitled to your opinion. That’s what, two? three?
Not necessarily. According to Dante Alighieri, Hell offers the occasional guided tour to the pre-deceased.