You can always e-mail them and ask.
“Shut up,” he explained.
Several infractions ago. However, **Ed **apparently isn’t concerned whether or not his staff actually follow his rules.
Here’s the thing, **Quasi **mein Freund: we don’t want **twickster **to leave the site. We just want her to step down as a moderator. She has demonstrated, time and again, that she has a chronic incapacity to separate her personal feelings from her moderation. Repeatedly, she has taken official actions based not on the rules of the board she’s supposed to be enforcing but on her personal preferences. And this isn’t the Twickster Message Board; it’s the SDMB.
There’s a difference between forgiving an action and excusing it. We can forgive **twickster **while still requesting that she be held accountable for her actions.
Let’s say there’s a police officer who really doesn’t like blue cars. So sometimes, for no legal reason at all, he’ll pull over a blue car and give the driver a ticket. If he says he’s sorry every time he gets caught doing it, do you think he should keep his job?
Nnnnnnnnnope.
Hi SFG. Quibbling with analogies if like, oh, shooting fish in a barrel: good messy scaly fun.
There’s an unpaid local deputy who puts in regular hours keeping drunks from pissing in the town’s fountains. About every two months the deputy pulls over someone in a blue car and gives them a ticket. It takes ten minutes for the driver to email the courthouse, and explain the situation. The ticket is voided.
There is then a five day protest rally calling for the volunteer deputy’s resignation.
Do I think the deputy should keep Her unpaid job? Shrug.
The key issue (as has been mentioned) is if there is a ready and waiting pool of superior applicants ready to step in. Is there? I have no idea.
I do notice there is no shortage of SDMB posters who are, IMO, idiots. There’s also a large pool of posters who make a big deal over very minor fuck-ups. Maybe I’m overly aware of the problem posters, and ignoring the teeming dozens of consistently even-handed ones. But until I find out otherwise I’m going to assume that the Big Benevolent Powers That Be know better than I do about the availability of good, ready and willing Mods in waiting.
If a whole bunch of posters I respect speak up in a thread, and reveal that they have volunteered to moderate then I’ll change my mind.
The whole idea of taking applications for moderators kind of weirds me out. IME it works best when current mods and staff nominate moderators out of the current pool of posters. Letting people nominate themselves seems like a great way to get people who just like waving around the big stick.
I volunteered. Was told I can’t be a mod here because **Ed’**s afraid I might be mean to people. Given Twickster’s history, and that of at least one other mod here, I find that more than a little ironic. I have a decade of mod experience elsewhere, generally know the rules of the various forums at least as well as most mods here, and am usually correct when I report threads. But Big Bad Oak might be mean to people. :rolleyes:
Hell, if I weren’t so sure I’d be flat-out rejected from having spent too much time pointing out awkward things like “your staff are breaking your own rules” and “you’re putting short-term profits above long-term community viability,” I’d toss my own hat into the ring. God knows I’d qualify if they were only objectively considering prior experience.
Just to be clear, I didn’t mean this as a slight against twickster. Not everyone is cut out to be a mod. I know I’m not. There’s no reason to be ashamed that you (general “you”) can’t pull it off.
Can those who are claiming that “what the fuck is wrong with you” is an insult please tell me where the insult is? An insult is a derogatory description of someone - there’s no description in “what the fuck is wrong with you”. People need to either grow some thicker skin around here or figure out a way to prevent their panties from getting *so *bunched up.
Just FYI, the next time someone tells you that there is something wrong with you as a person, they are not trying to flatter you.
The statement is saying “there is SOMETHING wrong with you and I want to know what it is that causes you to think/behave the way you do”.
Just as a test (I don’t really mean this), what would you think if I had responded:
“what the fuck is wrong with you that you couldn’t figure that out?”
I’d think to myself “RaftPeople is being a little testy and snarky”. That’s not against the rules and there’s still no insult. You can be offended by it all you like - or you could just grow some thicker skin/unbunch the panties/desandify your vag and move on. Getting worked up over warmed-over snark isn’t worth it. Demanding a change of guard over warmed-over snark is butthurtness to the Nth degree.
The question of whether anyone should be offended by it is different from the question of whether it’s an insult. IMO it’s pretty clearly an insult, whether or not you think it’s serious enough to warrant offense or not.
I’d be an excellent king, too, but there’s a conspiracy in the Illuminati to keep me down.
Wheels within wheels, man.
Our rules are built around coddling sandy-vagina types. Since they exist, however, they should be applied universally.
I believe that they do it both ways.
I have tried to make this same argument, in vain, many times over the years.
Either it’s an insult or it isn’t. If it isn’t, people shouldn’t get warned or admonished for it. If it is, Moderators shouldn’t be allowed to use it. Either way works for me.
Then I’ll ask again - what is the specific insult?
While I cannot disagree with this with regard to the current practice of moderation on the board, it’s a fairly new phenomena. The rules themselves allow for a great deal of abuse - poster to poster, mod to poster, poster to mod, you name it - but we’ve gone from a “strict constructionist” model to a “legislating from the bench” model (to the occasional “interpretational jazz” technique).
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” = “There is something fucking wrong with you.” To me, that sounds like an insult. Although I do realize that interpreting what is and is not an insult is somewhat subjective. I agree with this:
“There is something very wrong with you.”
I wasn’t sure if it was the kind of thing that people got warned or admonished for. Is it? I don’t remember ever seeing a moderator note because someone said “what is wrong with you” outside the pit.