Those limits include threats and expressions of desire for violence even, as Dex pointed out above, in the face of vile and hateful verbal provocation. You and marley are just talking in circles and not giving a straight answer to the simple question of why one person is being treated differently than another.
Q.E.D., you have been warned several times about “playing Junior Mod.” And here you are, still pretending you know what’s going on amongst Mods? I am not now, nor have I ever been, “boss” of any other mod.
Mods do disagree, from time to time and from forum to forum and based on individual circumstances. The “boss” of all the mods is Ed Zotti.
Please, Q.E.D., please please STOP making statements about what you think the mods feel or do, or how we interpret the rules. This is yet another Official Warning to you about this. Our tolerance is limited.
It’s not the first time.
So is mine. That was NOT “playing junior mod,” so take your warning and stuff it. This place has gone to shit, and attitudes like this are the major reason.
Do as you will. I don’t care.
waves good-bye
Since I’m the one who responded to Argent Towers’ post, I’d like to comment on this. No one is disputing that AT broke a rule with his post. No one is saying that the fact that he was provoked absolves him from his own behavior. However, not all rule violations result in official warnings. In fact, I’d guess that probably less than half of them do. Do a search on my username and the phrase “Mod Note:” and you’ll see many cases where someone has broken a rule and I’ve chosen to simply point it out to them and ask them not to do it again. I think it makes for a better message board if we aren’t so black and white in rule enforcement that we have to treat every infraction with the same severity.
There’s no overarching policy on when to hand out official warnings and when to simply step in and ask people to cool it, the mods just have to use their judgment. This was a case where I felt telling AT to cool it was sufficient. Note that mshar253 had not been subject to any official action at that point either, so it wasn’t a case of warning one and not the other – I elected not to warn anybody at that point. You may disagree with my judgment call here, which is fine of course, but I think it’s best to look at it as a standalone case and not precedent for all future rule enforcement. Not every warning is Brown v. Board of Education. 
Unsurprisingly, this is not appropriate for this forum. Take it to the Pit if you want to tell people to stuff it.
pretty please?
I think your original judgement call was fine, Giraffe, and if it had been left at that, I wouldn’t have minded. It’s the later judgement (which I assume was made by consensus after discussion) that isn’t sitting well, as the excuse that’s being used for the suspension is the edited post, and it seems to me that that isn’t a good enough reason since most edits are treated as gone and forgotten.
Bad taste, maybe, but in terms of the rules it’s a non-issue as far as I’m concerned. The jerk is the guy who made the comment, not the guy who called him on it.
And they’ll continue to be treated that way. Most people aren’t editing racist comments into and out of their posts.
That’s fine, and I can’t disagree with you on any one point. But, IMO, saying AT wasn’t suspended because he was provoked by mshar is simply boiling down to “he (mshar) started it.” Which is fine, if that’s how you feel things should be handled, but at least be upfront about that.
I never said anything remotely like “AT wasn’t suspended because he was provoked by mshar”. AT wasn’t suspended because getting pissed and saying you’d beat someone up if you could isn’t generally the sort of thing we suspend people for, even if we end up suspending the people they’re pissed at. It is the sort of thing we sometimes warn people for, but not always, depending on the circumstances.
Fair enough – I wasn’t trying to speak to whether or not mshar235’s suspension was justified (I argued against it, FWIW), just whether Argent Towers was getting a pass for behavior that normally automatically draws a warning/suspension simply because he was provoked.
My apologies; you’re right, of course, you didn’t. I didn’t actually mean to imply that you did. However, Marley did. I should have been clearer on that point.
The mod made a point to say “Mod note” and say what they had to say. It was said he backed down after he was warned when he didn’t. When responding to my post that laying out the post numbers, Marley23 didn’t dispute that it was a warning and admitted that he didn’t back down like first reported. You’re splitting hairs.
Oh man, that’s pretty funny stuff. The guy was out of control which is a description of his behavior, not a condemnation of his soul. The fact that you want to flex up on it at this point in time amuses me to no end. I guess one can’t even describe the tone of posts which are being referred to here in ATMB.
And why are you saying I didn’t need to tell you the rules? You said that “wishing death on non-members isn’t an issue” while that is in direct opposition to Ed Zotti’s words here that we are supposed to follow. It would seem to me that things that are written in black and white so clearly wouldn’t be considered a gray area for interpretation, unless you’re contending that these two posters are at war. So, you may believe that I don’t need to tell you the rules. That would seem to me that you are saying you were aware of Ed’s words and you made a decision that directly opposes his explicit rule. Oh believe me, I’ve been around here long enough to know that he’ll come in here and back you but it would be nice for those of us who have to follow the rules if at least some of them (big ones like wishing death and harm) would be ones that we could count on being enforced with some degree of fairness.
Apparently you believe that someone telling him that his girlfriend is ugly is harsh enough to to warrant him going on and on and on and on and on about it for comment after comment after comment. Interesting!
Also, as you pointed out the rules also includes hate speech. If you read the many posts of Argent in that thread, you’ll also find some hate speech so I’m not sure what you’re pointing out there but it does go both ways.
Interpreting the rules would imply that the rules aren’t clear enough in a situation to give a straight answer. Ed’s rule that I quoted above seems pretty straightforward. I can’t imagine how that rule would need to be interpreted as it explains the expectation clearly. So it is junior modding to point out that the decision that was made is in direct violation of the rules of Ed? If so, please don’t let the Bush administration catch wind of it or we’ll get laws that pointing out their law breaking would also be considered against the law.
Impressive stuff, really.
And, really, I wasn’t even doing that much. I merely pointed out to Marley that Dex’s post disagree with him. There’s no interpretation there whatosever; it’s as plain as black and white. Dex apparently took issue with my characterization of him as Marley’s boss. Fine, mea culpa. I was under the misapprehension that Administrators outranked Moderators. It was only necessary to point out that that was not actually the case, and not get all shrill about “junior modding” and warnings and all that inapplicable hogwash.
You were talking about the poster, not the post. We’ve always made that distinction, for example, in allowing criticisms of posts and arguments in Great Debates while not allowing flaming of posters.
You’re not new here. There’s been a rule about not wishing death on other posters in the Pit since time immemorial, and the exception proves the rule. It’s part of the same rule AT broke, it’s clearly written in the Pit rules, and you must know that, so I’m not sure why I have to explain this. That rule very specifically does not include non-posters, so wishing death on non-posters in the Pit isn’t an issue here.
That does contradict Ed’s remarks in the registration agreement. Maybe that part of the agreement should be amended, or maybe Ed is aware and the admins feel the registration agreement should be consistent about that, with exceptions made only in the Pit rules.
I notice you left out the racial slurs which were key to this entire situation. That’s not an honest or faithful representation of what’s been discussed here.
Hate speech has a specific meaning that deals with prejudice. One poster expressing his hatred for another poster is not hate speech and shouldn’t be described as such.
So now you’re telling me what I think? Q.E.D. isn’t allowed to guess what mods are thinking but you know what I’m thinking better than I do? How is that you can do that? Well, you answering that is pointless since I’ll have to go by your decision regardless. Either way, thanks for clearing that up for me. I so often am unaware of how I mean things.
I guess you have to explain this (see how you can use sarcasm here and it’s not the Pit, neat!) because (once again) the decision you arrive at is (as you mention below) in direct opposition to Ed’s rule. Please don’t pretend that you’re enlightening me about anything here, what you’re actually doing is justifying your earlier explanation of why you feel his death wishes were irrelevant. In simple words, and I guess I’m not sure why I have to explain this, you were aware that there is a rule about not threatening or wishing death on people and decided that AT’s threats and death wishes were justified because someone called his girlfriend ugly.
That’s between you, Ed, and the other mods/admins. Until such a change is made, we (well, some of us) have to follow the rules as Ed has written them.
I left it out because I never saw it before it was edited out. AT had already made his threats BEFORE askeptic pointed it out in post #114. Regardless of what AT thinks, saying that she is Asian in his original assessment of her “beauty” isn’t racist anymore than what was pointed out in post #184:
So AT wasn’t aware of the edited comment EITHER when he made those threats. So, moot point.
I don’t concern myself with what people think because my moderating powers don’t include psychic ability. I go by what they post. What you wrote was, “Argent was a raging nutbar in that post.”
True or false: that exception has existed in the Pit rule for a very long time.
As Skip said above, we know he broke the rule. We decided not to warn him. It’s not the first time somebody has broken a rule without getting a warning. When I see two posters have insulted each other in a thread sometimes I’ll make a note to everybody to cool it instead of handing out a warning to each person, for example. It’s a better site if we handle things on a case by case basis instead of being unyielding in our application on the rules.
Death wishes on non-posters have been allowed in the Pit since April 2006 at the latest. It’s been in the forum rules since that time, and people take advantage of it all the time.
I disagree, and so did the rest of the group.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=365973 (Emphasis added.)
Now some of Giraffe’s writing is a bit confusing. Perhaps he meant to say something else entirely, but I read it as saying pretty much what **Marley23 **just said it does. I’ll also vouch for the fact that other board members know about this rule and take advantage of it.