As one of the few people to actually take the time to answer the OP in that thread, I support the mod action. Given the choice of that or closing the thread or moving it to another forum where it won’t get a serious answer, I choose telling people to STFU. It’s not like anyone was banned or got an actual warning over it, so relax.
The thread was mean. The OP wasn’t, but the thread was. There’s no reason why a ten-Doper pileup on even sven should be tolerated.
More and more these days, whenever the Mods tell anyone to STFU, you’d think basic civil rights were being trampled. “Help! Help! I’m being repressed! Come and see the repression inherent in the system!”
Here’s a question: Where did even sven volunteer? Who was he working for? In what year? For how long? How many times?
She.
And that’s actually five questions…
I am ashamed.
People seem to like to needle even sven over her experiences in Africa apparently because she’s over-eager to share them, or perhaps she comes off as the “be all end all” authority on matters concerning Cameroon or possibly China.
But I have also seen threads on here praising her for her maturation. Something along the lines of “ah, you were once an immature wee lass on the SDMB and look how ye’ve grown” or some such.
So which is it? If you find someone annoying, that’s fine, but the thread WAS in GD and wasn’t overt trollery or anything. I like jokes deriding the supercilious nature of others as much as the next guy, but even I, with my propensity for going for the gross-out potshot felt that it was a little mean-spirited.
YMMV.
I was completely unaware of any connection between even sven and Cameroon or Africa. To me, it reads like any of a million other repeat ad nauseum the same post because two or three people accidentally missed the previous comment jokes. I thought it was totally obnoxious on those grounds.
I think Tomndebb is one of the best members of this board; not only is he a damn fine moderator, but a vastly better-than-average poster, too.
I don’t always agree with him. I don’t think he is always fair.
Once, he gave me an informal warning for saying something snarky…which I had thought was okay to say, because he himself had said exactly the same thing, although many months earlier, in a completely different thread.
(I said someone was making a fool of himself. Tom said not to say that…even though he, himself, had, at one point, said that someone was making a fool of himself.)
Hypocritical? Or simply doing his best to maintain order, and making rulings on the fly? I vote the latter. Otherwise, he would have to maintain a goddamn database of every possible form of rebuke, and look up every instance in detail before saying anything. Obviously, impossible.
Perfect? Nope; humanity is like that.
Damn fine, admirable, an asset to the boards, trustworthy, educated, actually relatively restrained, and well worth emulating. In nearly every way, the antithesis of a poopy-head.