Not exactly a pitting, but there’s certainly a very strident argument about the moderation of a forum going on, and that sounds exactly like one of the things the Pit is for: complaints about the administration of this message board.
My memory must be playing tricks on me. I sure thought we had a rule on the SDMB that all criticism of moderators (even questions about how moderators work) was to be done in the Pit. I just went searching through the stickies in ATMB and through the FAQ, and I can’t find any such rule.
Am I misremembering the rule, or just failing to find it?
Yeah, this is pretty much how i feel. Some drive-by jokes can get a bit annoying, but far less so than straight-up bad information.
Also, if we’re harking back to the halcyon days of manhattan, it’s worth noting that, while he did his best to keep political pot-shots out of GQ, he was not averse to drive-by jokes or humorous asides. A search of manhattan’s own GQ contributions turns up the following three examples, all within the first 30 results:
As for the particular incident referred to in the OP, it was pretty clear to me that it was intended as a joke. On the other hand, potshots at Bush are so common on this board, and have become such a bone of contention, that perhaps it would be better for such things to be discouraged in GQ, even if they’re intended as a joke. I’m happy to slam the current administration in threads where it’s relevant to the topic, but it does get a little old when it’s a potshot in a completely unrelated thread.
That’s a good goal; however, I don’t think it’s really our role as moderators. Really, the only practical way this can be done is by other posters challenging misinformation (which is something I do in my role as a poster, but generally refrain from doing as a moderator except in exceptional cases).
Our main role, in my view, is to facilitate the exchange of information by preventing fights and excessive hijacks. Unless we recruit moderators in every field of knowledge, we can’t as moderators expect to weed out incorrect information. Since we do have posters in a wide variety of fields, it’s better to rely on their expertise than to try to do it ourselves.
I’ll second this.
I get tired of debunking the same old same old, and now with so many old threads unavailable, I can’t even cite (or cut and paste) my previous essays on the relevant topics.
Agreed.
Hope so. Some evidence suggests otherwise. Some folks have had the audacity to question my pronoucements on Tolkien!! 
As it should be
It may be worse, or I may be more jaded. Or both. And I surely do remember handy. And his contentions about why snot was green. :rolleyes:
It still does seem to me, as I gaze backwards thru my rose-tinted retrospectoscope, that back in the good old days, fighting ignorance was considered by more members here to be the board’s primary purpose. But I’m definitely getting to be an old fart, so take that FWIW.
That was one of the things I was going to post, but I didn’t want to pick on the Board.
It’s very demoralizing to see a thread where someone’s asked a question, see about half a dozen answers along the lines of “I dunno, but…” (or else the Google for a Wiki and say “ha HA! The day is mine!”) and you do a search and find in the first couple of hits the 5-paragraph essay that you wrote to answer the question completely. Or worse, the Staff Report you did that answers the question. Yes the Search function does not always work, and yes there are threads that have been deleted and are probably never coming back but there’s a huge amount that does still exist. How many times, for instance, are people going to ask if it’s better to set back your thermostat during the day?
Qadgop and Una, I most certainly share your pain. I get tired of explaining for the umpteenth time about, fer example, what a species is, and of seeing someone who doesn’t speak a word of Spanish “helpfully” posting some babelfish mistranslation. However, simply being a dumbass isn’t technically against the rules here.
I wish people would read the FAQ.
I wish people would read the rules and guidelines.
I wish people would read the stickies.
I wish people would read the forum descriptions.
I wish people would only post solid factual information (or genuinely funny jokes) in GQ.
People in Hell want ice-water, but they ain’t gonna get it either. 
Yeah, that’s true. But then, my opinion is that Manhattan was a bully and an arsehole. I don’t have a particular problem with the current level of GQ modding. Maybe it could be tuned up a little, but I can’t see any major problem.
My last post, Colibri, has nothing to do with Moderation. In fact, the only thing I’ve said about current GQ Moderation is that it’s “pretty good.” What I lament is just how GQ isn’t working sometimes because the members to some extent are not making it work, and because of the Board software troubles.
I wasn’t assuming you were talking about moderation. And as I said, I do share your and Qadgop’s frustrations about GQ. I think where we differ is the perception that GQ is much different than it ever was.
manhattan had an authoritarian style, to be sure, but I don’t think even that made a lot of headway against dumb posts.
Well, I guess I must be one of the Un-Kewl Kids then, 'cause I have absolutely no idea which SDMB meme The Controvert was supposed to have been parroting.
Bush-Bashing for Fun and Profit?
Ding-ding-ding. We have a winner! It amazing and amusing how far the topic of a GQ thread can be stretched to provide an opportunity to bash Bush, SUV drivers, christians, Americans, Canadians, French, non-Mac users, or Wal-mart.
Una Persson probably hit the nail on the head. I’m just getting old and tired and cranky. I have to agree, too, that it wasn’t really better in the good old days. I remember that about the time I started lurking here, there was a rash of threads started in GQ that were thinly veiled excuses to proclaim the superiority of their newly discovered veganism. “Do animals souls cry out in pain when the brutal humans needlessly slaughter them for the greedy corporations like McDonalds?”
Okay, that was a bit of an exaggeration. But, I’m not in GQ, am I?
I don’t like to weigh in on these as we can assume the mods are doing the best they can, but :
A. Gfactor’s response on post number 3 is so totally snarky it is preposterous. If you don’t want to be a mod then don’t be one. Don’t make it someone else’s problem with belittling sarcasm because you (half assed admittedly) missed one. This response was uncalled for
B. I too am worried about GQ we did lose something there & it seems on the edge of becoming a glorified IMHO really. I will add when the mods - volunteers doing their best & working for nothing (that always needs to be said) - are called on this they tend to get overly crabby.
I just want to say that, “Thanks Hawthorne” and say Colbri and eventually GFactor make a reasonable case why it happened in a slightly cantankerous and midly pissy way.
I don’t know whether The Controvert’s post was dull Bush bashing or an attempted satire of it. Anyway I don’t think that political opinions do or have ever sullied moderation here.
We seem to have reached a view here that GQ is not what we’d like but there’s not much that can be done and that my feeling that things have slipped is just me getting old and cranky. Fair enough I suppose. Probably what GQ really needs is the influx of new posters that free posting will bring.
Maybe I just want to see people getting admonished as a small signal to those who do behave. But if it wouldn’t change anything I suppose that would be pointless.
All those conciliatory things aside, it’s a bit sad to see that GFactor doesn’t understand the difference between ATMB and the Pit. It doesn’t inspire confidence in his judgment about what does and doesn’t belong in GQ.
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Sorry, that was just me being old and cranky. There’s a bit of overlap between the two forums in cases like this. We’ve definitely had similar threads in both places. But your placement of the thread here certainly was not wrong. If it’s about stickies, as your OP title suggested, it probably fits better in ATMB; if it’s about a specific moderator action (this one wasn’t), it usually goes in the Pit, but see, e.g., "illegal drug interactions" thread should not have been closed - About This Message Board - Straight Dope Message Board I saw this OP as a middle case, and I’ve seen those in both fora. E.g., A bit aggressive with the Moderating - About This Message Board - Straight Dope Message Board
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It’s Gfactor, with a small f, dammit.
Well, that’s just because the average SUV-driving, French-hating, Canadian-loving, Windows-using, American Christian probably bought his sense of humor at Wal*Mart.
Sorry - couldn’t resist.
Why – I’ll have you know I bought my sense of humor at Tractor Supply and I don’t drive an SUV. There’s nothing Sporty about my UV. And, I don’t know any French people yet, so I haven’t had the opportunity to hate them. I have liked all of the Canadians I’ve met, so far.
This is a joke, right?
Manny’s tough stance on things and people was very useful in its day but that day has passed; today’s poster is by and large much more sensitive – many are oversensitive and incredibly thin skinned – and very quick to take offense and to even read injury and abusive intent into situations where none was ever intended.
While Manny would have told the offenderati to get bent, get a life, get over themselves, today’s moderators on this board do not have that as an option.