No, I am not asking about the expectation to follow moderator instructions. I suspect you knew that, since the post I questioned did not discuss that… What I am asking about is when it became mandatory that members must read every mod note in every thread in which they participate.
No, I didn’t know that- I’m not playing coy. The two points seem almost identical: it seems beyond obvious that to follow moderator instructions one must read the moderator instructions when they come up. If you don’t read the instructions then you can be moderated for not following them.
There is no rule that says, “You must read every mod note in a thread you’re posting to.” Nor did I say there was. There is, as you know, a rule that you have to follow a moderator’s instructions, and “I didn’t bother to read your note,” has never been an acceptable excuse for breaking that rule.
Yeah, and it’s happened over and over again whether it involves reaction to the Paterno thread or not. Anytime you wind up in a post where I’m mentioned it’s a sure bet there’ll be an insult there.
I don’t report posts all that often, but even so I don’t think a post I’ve reported anywhere on this board has been acted upon in two to three years. As I said, you’re not the only one who’s not responded when I’ve reported posts, but more often than not when I have, it’s been in the Pit. And IIRC a fair number of them involved posters making snide paper towel tube comments.
You’re certainly quick enough to show up and issue some on-the-fly ruling and declare it to be the de facto SDMB position, as you have in this thread with the heretofore unknown requirement that all of a mod’s notes should be read in any thread a poster is participating in.
And it isn’t necessarily a matter of pull. Just by being the first one to issue a decision you set a precedent that no other mod is going to want to countermand even in the unlikely event they were of a mind to.
It didn’t have anything to do with PMs between us. Some poster had made one of those “nobody here agrees with you” posts that people sometimes use to try to discount whatever point I’m trying to make. In response I said something along the line that I would occasionally get PMs from posters who agreed with me or were congratulating me or perhaps encouraging me to keep up the good fight. While not acting as a mod you were still a mod by this time and you claimed repeatedly that I was lying and my claims were bullshit. Given that you either had access to my PMs and knew I was being truthful or you didn’t and were faking it based upon information you were perceived to have obtained as a moderator, you were lying either way.
Again, “I didn’t bother to read your note” and “I decided to skip over a note because it addressed behavior I wasn’t engaging in and wouldn’t be engaging in” are not the same thing and you know it.
It’s clearly been stated in this thread that posters are expected to read everything written in a mod note in any thread they’re participating in, and it’s been used as the basis for not rescinding the warning I received. This fact is exactly why so many people are questioning it.
I don’t think we need to make a rule about things that are common sense. (But reading ATMB sometimes makes me think we might have to.;))
As has been said, in a very long thread we may give someone a pass if they missed a mod note several pages back. But that’s rarely the case.
Oh, that. I have absolutely no way of seeing what’s in your inbox. We’ve always been pretty explicit about that, as that was why we couldn’t (until recently*) moderate the contents of PMs: we had no way to verify the contents of the PMs except the say-so of the complainer. I was in no way trying to imply that I had special knowledge about the contents of your PM inbox, I was just making a judgement about the plausibility of your claims and the nature of your character.
*What’s changed is that the board software now allows you to report PMs, which automatically sends us a copy of the original message. We still have no way to look into your inbox or otherwise read your PMs.
How do you know a note addresses behavior you weren’t engaging in? Because in this case it did.
You are mistaken. The mod note was to everyone in the thread and your first post in that thread was about the transgender issue, so it applied to you both generally and specifically.
You made a judgement call as to whether it applied to you and you chose not to read the second sentence, unfortunately you were wrong. You made a mistake, but doubling down on how it really wasn’t your fault just isn’t working.
They’re really not.
“So many people” = you and Scumpup.
No, but every one of us has the right to decide for ourselves whether a post deserves moderation. In my opinion yours unquestionably did.
This is what you wrote:
Sounds very much to me like either a physical threat or a deliberate attempt to goad your opponent into saying something that would almost certainly get him banned.
Sigh
Again you’re getting tripped up due to the way the note was composed. As I said before, I didn’t see the “Everyone involved:” comment and even if I had I would have thought it was meant for everyone involved in the Frankenstein brouhaha. So I likely wouldn’t have read further then either.
I was involved in several Dolezal threads as well as following several other threads all at the same time and was hopscotching around between them. When I’m engaged in that sort of board activity I frequently skip over posts and comments that don’t seem to pertain to the things I’m following. It’s a time allocation issue. I simply don’t have time to read everything written in every thread I’m following, so I scan for what interests me and skip over what doesn’t in order to move on to the next germane post or off to the next thread.
It’s Oh, it became clear long ago that the warning wouldn’t be rescinded. I’m just trying to clear up misunderstandings - or in the case of Miller, deliberate mischaracterizations of my approach to mod notes.
IIRC, I challenged you on it at the time and you repeatedly refused to address it directly, responding instead with more iterations of “Liar” and “Bullshit”.
Yes it did, but the whole point is that a person would have to scrutinize it at least somewhat in order to determine that.
Here’s ITD’s post in its entirety. On my computer it takes up about four vertical inches, 3 7/8ths of which relate to the Frankenstein remark or are empty space.
I saw ITD’s comment in the first sentence, skimmed down to get a quick glance of the quotes in the quote boxes, and given that I had no intention of becoming involved in the Frankenstein issue I moved on, probably to another thread entirely.
Then, twenty three hours later, I happened upon tomndebb’s sympathetic post about Rachel Dolezal and it triggered the stream of consciousness post I wrote which resulted in the warning. The Frankenstein issue and IvoryTowerDenizen’s note couldn’t have been further from my mind at the time because I had nothing to do with it. Further, news accounts all over the internet were discussing transexuals and the Dolezal situation and whether the arguments for the one do or don’t apply for the other. So in addition to missing ITD’s note, not knowing transgenderism had been placed off limits, and having been immersed in news accounts relating them, it never occurred to me at all that I was doing anything wrong.
In fact, when I got the PM from IvoryTowerDenizen announcing the warning I thought it was going to be a note congratulating me on what a nice post it was. 
I don’t post much in MPSIMS and at that point it hadn’t even sunk in that IvoryTowerDenizen was a mod. That’s what a good job I was doing of scanning over the parts of the thread I wasn’t focused on.
You might need to look at the application of it though.
If ignorance of a mod instruction is no defense, then what of the many, many people who do not read every page and every post of every thread, but who jump in to give their opinion anyway. Its incredibly common to see a post started with “I haven’t read all the posts but…”.
When those people fall foul of a mod instruction it now seems precedent has been set for official warnings as the punishment. This being the case, should the mod instructions be made more visible?
Its common on other boards to have thread title edited to include reference to any mod instructions. For example “So I got this turnip (MOD WARNING Post 458)”. Should this practice be adopted here?
Thank you, BB, that sounds like a useful suggestion. It also seems to me that it might not be too onerous to maintain for the mods.
What thinkest thou, o Mods?
SA has a point here. The Moderation in question started with “adaher”, it is reasonable that someone might thought “Okay, the mods are talking to adaher”, and just move on.
The way warnings and the like are handled here is really unnecessary. I’m referring to the tone and manner of policing. It’s a choice. Just like with actual police, you have a spectrum from a nice reasonable cop who is just trying to keep everyone safe and the guy who was not popular in high school and now is going to impose his will to the letter of the law at the most minor infraction and nothing will ever dissuade him. There’s one of those guys in the local police department where I live. I played football with him in HS. He was a dick then and a dick now. And every other cop knows he’s a dick. If the whole department adopted his attitude, the town would be a pretty shitty place to live for those who might ever do anything slightly wrong that a cop might see. Fortunately, the other cops seem to have a really nice attitude about things. It’s sad that the tone of the moderation here is to so rarely really listen once they’ve engaged with a poster (as a moderator). This is a perfect example. I mean, is what SA did really that big a deal in this case? Is his explanation not reasonable? Shouldn’t/couldn’t the mods accept that it is reasonable that a oat starting off with “adaher” might be something that adaher needs to read but not anyone else?
Sheeze, if there are ever times when you can choose to be a bit more Andy Griffith-like and acknowledge that the moderation might have been handled with more clarity, this is a pretty good example.
I see that bucketybuck has made a good observation as well. If there is a long thread, is one responsible to read all 20 or so pages to see what mod notes might have been offered? That seems unreasonable. But I bet that guy I played football with in HS would think it’s a great idea.
Hi!
Oh, well, so long as it unquestionably did…in your opinion. :rolleyes:
Wrong on both counts. How unfortunate for you!
“So many people…” Is that like the “hundreds of people” of Miss Pross?