Revisiting the BBQ Pit- Boon or Bane?

[ParallelLines]

I feel that taking a good long look over the old thread -

How reprehensible do YOU want to be in the Pit?

As some of you are no doubt aware, we had a bit of drama related to the Pit recently, which has led to me reconsidering my approach to how I moderate the Pit. Previously, I’d held to a position where pretty much any sort of insult was allowed, short of racial slurs. I used this standard because I felt it was about as objective as possible, but it’s led to a number of situations in the last couple years where I was defending behavior that made me nauseous, and I don’t want to do that anymore. …

Is a great place to start. Because from the OP, I think we’re right back to talking about this -

@Miller

My goal here is to reign the Pit in, not neuter it. I want to still allow posters a lot of latitude in how they express themselves, without turning the Pit into a refuge for toxic assholes.

Part of the problem seems to be with perception, valid or not, that we tend to have dog-piles going on, so rather than it be a specific poster calling out another specific poster, we have what feels like a mob of like minded people all repeating insults to a single, or single group of posters. Which brought me to an old quote of **TubaDiva’**s

@TubaDiva

Remember all those times we said, “hey, why don’t you take that outside?” Well, here’s where you go.

No, really. This is where you go for all those verbal fistfights. When a thread veers from debate and/or discussion into personal attack, sneering insults, and “Yo Mommas,” y’all should step outside to this thread.

Remember, although AOL’s Terms of Service do not usually apply and we will give you SOME latitude, this is no back alley and you will be expected to be if not civil at least semi-reasonable. Pure evil and/or rants won’t fly – unless they’re really entertaining.

There are going to be a ton of different points of view. I strongly believe the Pit provides a place where people can vent, and at some level prevents posters from flaming out because the find another specific poster to be consistently bloody minded or immoveable in the face of all evidence. But I also believe that some posters, who may have been able to redeem themselves, double down in face of the abuse (justified or not) from the pit, and flame out.

So, I think it should be kept, but maybe with some ‘house rules’ that rather than add new ‘bright lines’: specifically I’d like say a 30 day cap on a thread about another poster. If you hate me for this post, you’d be able to Pit me for it, but at the end of 30 days, the thread closes. Yes, if I’m continuously post like a yutz without tripping over the ban-line, I’m going to have a lot of threads. But by keeping it to a shorter duration, the complaints would focus on the specific act of yutz-ery, rather than be an ongoing pile on.

I picked 30 days as a nice round number, we could argue (or suggest to the mods rather, since it won’t be our final decision) 3 days, a week, whatever. But this way we turn it to more of a event (which I know some would take a perverse pride in!) rather than an endless ‘what has x done this week’ which feels like a chore. And it lives up to the metaphor from TubaDiva before - make it a fight, it starts for reasons, it has consequences, and most importantly it ENDS. If someone starts/picks a fight later, you may have similar or the same reasons, but it’s another fight.