no.
She was given a note for creating the thread in GQ instead of IMHO and told she’s not allowed to ask a question without revealing the actual reason for asking.
The thread could have simply been moved to IMHO and so far as I know there’s no rule in any forum the requires explaining your motive for asking a question.
IOW, what did she do that makes her a jerk?
What rule did she break?
She didn’t break a rule. I didn’t say she was a jerk. But that doesn’t mean she didn’t act in a jerkish way. Why can’t we grade posters on a sliding scale. We do=–we note/we warn /we ban.
Noting is a mild criticism.
A future Straight Dope column:
*Dear Cecil:
Sometimes I can see the moon during the daytime. How is that possible?
—Curious in Cleveland*
Cecil replies:
Why do you want to know? I’m not going to waste my time on this unless you have a good reason for asking.
—Cecil Adams
Technically you didn’t call her a jerk, but you did say “I would give her a note rather than a warning for being a jerk”. That’s, uh, about as close to the line as you can get.
I understand that noting is mild criticism, but what is she being mildly criticized for?
She was very specifically told that she would be subject to a warning if she repeated the offense of not explaining why she’s asking a question.
That’s the point of the thread. We’ve never required that of posters in the past. I don’t think it’s a rule. I don’t think Anise was being a jerk.
But back to the OP, is there a rule that says you have to give your motivation for asking a question?
Here’s the note, Colibri makes it pretty clear that it’s the case.
I think a poster got annoyed at the OP and reported the thread and Colibri saw the report, scanned the post and confirmed that the OP wasn’t completely forthcoming about the background, and somehow construed that to be something almost like trolling - just posting for shits and giggles and getting people to answer in earnest and then posting a “gotcha! haha I didn’t really even care!” or something like that. But on its face it wasn’t like that at all.
OP: “What’s the answer to this factual question?”
Poster: “This is the answer to that factual question.”
OP: “Thanks. By the way here is why I wanted to know. [silly reason]”
Poster: “So, you have completely wasted my time!”
The only thing I could imagine the OP learning from the mod note about how to proceed in the future is never tell anyone why you’re asking a question in GQ in case they will think it wasn’t a good enough reason and get upset.
There are some question (like “how can you see the moon during the day”) that are a matter of intellectual interest, and the motivation for asking them certainly doesn’t matter. It’s an interesting discussion to have, that anyone might choose to participate who feels that it’s something interesting to discuss.
Tailored tax advice regarding specific personal circumstances is surely something else. It’s hardly particularly interesting as a matter of general intellectual interest. It was something I happened to know a fair bit about, because of my personal situation, and I took the time to try to help someone out.
When I discovered that the reason for asking was some dumb trivial nonsense to get out of a gym membership, and the information wasn’t really required at all, I got annoyed and overreacted in what I posted just because I was having a bad day for other reasons. I actually reported myself because my own comment expressing my annoyance was inappropriately harsh, and probably junior modding, or whatever - but not appropriate in any event.
So no, I don’t think questions like this should be “disallowed” in any sense. But I think just as a matter of eqiquette if you’re asking people for help in a community, it’s reasonable to be respectful about it. A question like that is surely likely to be something that’s going to take someone time to answer properly, and I don’t think it’s polite to ask it if you don’t really need the information for any good reason. To just say that it should be entirely caveat emptor on the part of people trying to be helpful by answering GQ questions of this type is surely not going to foster a mutually helpful GQ community, is it? Should the OP have been taken out and shot? Of course not. But I don’t think telling them they were being inconsiderate was inappropriate.
I understand your point but in GQ (at least my perception of it) the reason for asking isn’t ever relevant whether it is for “How can I see the moon in the daytime?” or “What is the tax law about x?”
They asked hypothetically and even felt compelled to say several times thoughout the thread, starting on post #3 before you ever posted, that the reason for asking was ‘really silly.’ They weren’t pretending to urgently need the information or even implying that the answer was of any real importance to them at all. They were just asking because they wanted to know as with any other GQ question.
I don’t either if that is how you felt. But a mod telling them they will be warned for doing it again when what they did doesn’t seem to violate any rules was the impetus for this thread.
For what it’s worth, contrary to what you and earlier posters have said, the OP asked about specific personal circumstances - a specific location in Sweden, and specific length of time. Sure the form of words was technically a hypothetical, but here’s the OP:
In the third post, OP adds it’s “too dumb to explain”, but that was actually cross posted (i.e. I had not seen it) when writing tax advice to the question originally posed. So at the time I answered, it certainly had not been made clear that this was a hypothetical posed for silly reasons, the OP didn’t look that way at all.
So, yeah, as I said I don’t think it’s a “rules” matter, but I hope you understand my annoyance, and that it’s something where maybe “guidance” is warranted.
I can understand why you were annoyed. Personally, my issue is that Anise took the heat for it and it’s created an odd precedent that I’m hoping to either get rid of or show how ridiculous it is.
Because of your report and what you called Anise, it’s now required that we cannot ask a question without also explaining why we are asking the question (cite: Colibri’s note when closing the thread, telling Anise she has to give the real reason she wants to know") OR you [all posters] need to decide that a question is worthy of your time that way things like this don’t happen.
Again, I get that you were annoyed that you spent some time putting together your answer, but the only reason you’re annoyed is because the OP wasn’t using it to actually inherit land in Sweden. As I stated earlier, if she hadn’t mentioned anything about the gym, no one would have cared. Nothing whatsoever changed when she made that post. If you were happy to provide it before, you could at least be neutral about it now.
Keep in mind why we’re all here, especially in GQ.
I’m just not seeing why you think there is some big philosophical rules issue that needs to be adjudicated here. The precedent you claim does not exist. The only general principle I see here is to be somewhat considerate of one another in the community in the way we ask questions which are of the more personal “helping one another out” type, so that we have a better community .
And in case it wasn’t crystal clear from what I wrote earlier, my response to Anise was wrong, I withdraw it (I would have done so immediately if I had got a grip within the edit window) and I apologize for it if he/she happens to be reading, it’s was an overreaction for entirely unrelated reasons. Mild annoyance and a shrug of the shoulders is all that was warranted.
“Let’s say” made it hypothetical. The entire situation, location, etc. Any hypothetical question might be full of specific parameters.
I don’t dispute that you have the right be annoyed if it annoyed you but disagree that it should be considered a waste of time in any sense. In most cases nobody knows why a poster asks a question in GQ, or whether any crazy schemes they may be working on in real life are a good idea. The focus of GQ is on the factual question portion of the OP and not the reason for asking in almost every case. It’s almost more like the OP and respondents are writing a knoweldgebase article about a subject for the internets at large to read and participate in than the person to person social interactions on the rest of the boards where reasons for asking might matter.
It’s actually a whole lot more likely for someone to be modded in GQ for criticizing the OP’s reason for asking a factual question than it is for the OP to be modded for not having a good enough reason, or any reason at all for asking. With questions like “How many calories are in the average male ejaculate?” that policy has always worked out best.
Exactly, she asked a question, you helped her out by answering it. End of story.
It doesn’t matter if she’s about to inherit land in Sweden or she likes to read foreign tax code to her fish to help them fall asleep.
What rule did the OP break?
I thought the Mods already explained what the Note(not a Warning) was for more than once in this thread? If they had to make a rule for every single type of jerkish behaviour possible this message board would be nothing but rules.
There’s another thing I hate hearing around here (the first one being ‘it’s just a note’), ‘if we had to make a rule for every…’.
We don’t have to make a rule for every situation, but in turn you can’t dole out warnings and notes for no reason.
And no, it hasn’t been explained. Colibri stopped in and reiterated that you have to “be upfront about the reason you are posting in GQ”.
That’s a huge change in how posting works on this board, it’s something that has never been required before. No one is asking for thousands of rules, they’re/we’re asking for clarification on that one. Is it a rule? If it’s not, why did Colibri shut down the thread and note Anise for not doing it? Are we all at risk for getting modded by explaining ourselves?
And regarding your comment about the ‘jerkish behavior’, the first time that was ever brought up was in this thread, by other mods. Colirbi gave Anise very specific directions.
So posting a hypothetical in GQ that asks for a factual answer for a reason that another poster disagrees with is being a jerk? Glad that is cleared up.
Seems to me Colibri unilaterally made it a rule.
I don’t think she was. If she were actually seeking legal advice, as we all know, the post wouldn’t have belonged in GQ. I still don’t see what’s so jerkish about asking a detailed hypothetical without stating upfront that it is hypothetical, and I don’t understand why such a thread would suddenly possibly belong in IMHO. This substantially changes what GQ has been about for the 17 years that I’ve been here. If people are suddenly going to start getting in trouble for this, the least the administrators could do is warn everyone else in advance. This is not a “we can’t make rules for every situation” sort of deal where it’s immediately clear that the behavior in question would be frowned upon.