Well...

The BBQ Pit
1

Part the First

Well, I see that the other thread is now locked, so I guess I’ll put this here.

This is not a farewell post, so all you people who were on your way down to the Reply box to post, “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out” can just come on back up here and help yourselves to a pickle juice lollipop and go sit in the corner.

And all you people who are just itching to type, “Get down off the cross, we need the wood” can help yourselves to a copy of Jack Chick’s Magnum Opus, The Execution, because it’s the only cross you’ll find in this thread.

Last Thursday morning, I did what I usually do every day, I went over to the house of some friends. They’ve got an unusual living arrangement–it’s a kind of leftover 1960s Hippie commune, with several people co-owning this big old house, and they hold a kind of 24/7 open house, where people drop in, shoot the breeze, drink coffee. How it’s funded is a mystery to us all, we are given to understand that there is “Daddy’s money” someplace, although it’s quite certain that they’re not selling drugs, nothing like that. You aren’t even allowed to smoke dope on the premises.

So anyway, all kinds of people drift in and out during the day, and any time you go over there you’re likely to find groups of people huddled together around the dining room table or in the living room, talking, smoking, etc. I usually don’t have much to say, because it’s mostly pretty deep stuff, religion, politics, stuff like that. But there are a bunch of us who hang out there who are similarly Philosophy-Challenged, and we exchange pleasantries and chitchat, and listen to the Big Guns argue, and all in all I really like going there.

So like I said, they drink coffee, and MAN can those people drink coffee, I’ve never seen anything like it, pots and pots, every day. And they get cranky when the coffee runs out, they stand there and grumble while they’re waiting for the fresh pot, it’s like the discussion runs on coffee. So one of the things I started doing when I first started going there was keep the coffeepots going. It’s a two-burner Bunn-O-Matic, and I just keep it going. I also walk around every so often picking up the dirty coffee cups (they use 100% recycled material cardboard cups) because I noticed that nobody EVER picked up the cups. Did I mention that my hippie friends are also total slobs? So anyway, I just always used to do that for them, although I drew the line at sweeping or washing dishes or anything.

So, last Thursday after I’d been there for a while, doing what I usually do, and just as I was making a Cup Patrol swing through the crowded, smoke-filled living room, a low, venemous female voice spoke.

“Jesus! Will you knock it off with the fucking Cup Patrol already!?” Startled, I looked around to see who she was talking to, and realized that everybody was staring at me.

“Um, what?”
She said, vindictively, “You’re always coming through here, and picking up the damn coffee cups, and you’re driving me crazy. Cut it out. It’s [the homeowners] job to pick up the coffee cups.”

And there was a chorus of agreement from both rooms. “Yeah, cut it out!” “Do you think you live here or something?”

And she added, “And quit making coffee, too, it’s [the homeowners] job to make coffee.”

Stunned and dismayed, I retreated to the kitchen. One of the homeowners was standing there, and he said, “They’re right, you know. It is our job to pick up the cups, and to make the coffee, too. Quit acting like you think you live here.”

And all I could say was, “I’ve been coming here, and making coffee, and picking up cups for nearly three years now–you couldn’t say something to me sooner?”

He said, “I was dropping subtle hints–I guess I suck at subtle hints, huh?”
I said, “No shit, sherlock.”

Coldfire, I’m sorry to keep hammering away at this, but I feel you have done me a great injustice, and I cannot rest until it’s cleared up. I still need to see some cites for your claim that I am “often” erroneous in my “junior mod” advice, and that I “frequently” make “half-guesses” that have to be corrected by Staff members. You made the claim as a poster–now back it up as a poster. Otherwise, you will have to go sit in the front pew with all the other perennially annoying banes of Great Debates, the “people who makes wild exaggerated claims in order to prove a point, but who, when called on for cites to back them up, are unable to do so, but who still refuse to withdraw the assertion.” Show me some cites that prove “often”, or withdraw the assertion.

What you actually said was, for reference:

And, in other news…

Yes, actually, I do. I think you shot off your mouth last month in ATMB, all by yourself, and then you shot off your mouth in Jarbaby’s thread, and so now I’m asking you to put your money where your mouth is.

“Subtle advice”? What’s wrong with spelling it out in words of one syllable? Because, the thing is, I still have NO idea what it is you’re getting at, specifically, by way of unacceptable “Junior mod” behavior. You say it’s okay for the membership to “self-police”. But it’s not okay for DDG to “self-police”? You say, “Yes, we’re happy to have the membership help out”. But “We’re not happy to have DDG help out”? I see a huge contradiction here. Be specific about what it is exactly that I’m posting that you are characterizing as “junior modding”, besides what was in DavidB’s thread, concerning, “do not post that you have reported a post to a moderator” and “do not post that an OP is copyrighted, and here’s the link”–I got that part. See, David seems to be able to explain things.

And, for heaven’s sake, if my behavior was THAT irritating, for nearly three years now, why didn’t you just send me an e-mail?

Answer: Because, obviously, my behavior wasn’t that irritating, and certainly not for for the last three years. People who indulge in behavior that truly irritates the mods for longer than a week get an e-mail from Lynn. P.D.Q.

And as for it being “your sole opinion”, are you asking me to believe that the mods have discussed my irritating “Junior Mod” behavior on the Mods board, and discussed what to do about it? If so, then I repeat, why in the world didn’t somebody just drop me an e-mail? Have I struck all of you as the sort of completely pigheaded person who won’t listen to reason? I can only marvel, slackjawed, at that, if true.

I submit also that, far from being an “ongoing problem”, it is something that has just come up in the past few weeks. Your cited ATMB “admonishment” to me was December 1, 2002.

DavidB’s “admonishment” to me was on December 22, 2002.

However, the Pit thread you cited as another example not only contained NO official Mod “admonishment” to me about “junior mod behavior”–you merely quibbled with me about “evil raping stepfathers”–but also it was dated May 3, 2002. My “junior mod” activities in that thread didn’t seem to be a problem for you last spring.

And of course, if you want to slide out by saying, “I don’t have to provide cites because I’m a moderator”, or, “We’ll discuss it in e-mail”, that’s your prerogative, but again, you made the statement as a poster, not as a moderator, so I think you should back it up as a poster.

…

2

Jarbaby: If you had really cared about me as a person, and really hadn’t wanted to hurt my feelings, you wouldn’t have put your “constructive criticism” in a Pit rant. That’s the bottom line, babe, no wiggling out of it.

And if you had really cared about me as a person, and hadn’t wanted to hurt my feelings, but for some reason really had felt impelled to put it in the Pit, you would have phrased your OP much more tactfully. For one thing, it would have been much shorter, and more to the point. But you rambled on, elaborating upon your theme. Do you think I don’t know a Pit rant when I see one? Your OP was a classic Pit rant–“Everything I Hate About This Subject.”

And in this case, the subject was Me.

Now, I really don’t care whether I annoy you or not, because I know I’ve annoyed other people on the boards in the past, and I can live with that, and I just work around them, but I do resent being made the unwilling object of one of Jarbaby’s Pit Rants. It’s clear to me that your intent was not “constructive criticism”, but simply that you saw a golden opportunity, an excuse, to post yet another Pit Rant, guaranteed to get you lots of Replies and lots of Views.

Now, I know perfectly well how this kind of “constructive criticism” Pit thread is supposed to work. Other people have been called into the Pit for “You’re driving me crazy–it’s constructive criticism time”, and what happens is that the OP and the Subject exchange views, and they go back and forth for a while, more or less politely, and what’s supposed to happen is that both sides make concessions, they say, “Okay, I see where you’re coming from”, and the OP gets strokes for (a) helping the Subject to become a kinder, gentler poster, and (b) for backing down on the OP a little, and the Subject gets strokes for (a) being willing to listen to constructive criticism, and (b) for agreeing to become a kinder, gentler poster.

But while this discussion is going on, in the meantime–ahh, here’s the rub. In the meantime, it’s a general invitation for a Pileon, and depending on how the rest of the Boards feel about the Subject, the pileon can get pretty ugly. And you know this as well as I do. Being the Queen of the Pit, and all.

So, my response to opening your thread and seeing that I was apparently to be the favored subject of Jarbaby’s next Pit Rant, and scrolling quickly through the OP and realizing with a sinking heart that you evidently weren’t kidding, that it wasn’t one of those fake “I hate you because you’re so wonderful” rants, that Jarbaby was going to pretend that she was only doing this for my own good, while the Pitizens would pile on, and pile on, and pile on–anyway, my main response was EXTREME and TOTAL fury that you were doing this to me. What had I ever done to you? Nothing, apparently, except have a posting style that you personally found annoying, and that you found convenient–and safe–to base a Pit rant on. You’re a smart cookie, and you know there are certain people who don’t like me already, and other people have been sniping at me recently for “junior modding”, so you knew you’d have a certain amount of support, it wasn’t like you were going to be stuck with a rerun of Hardygrrl’s ill-fated Flam Pitting, or KellyM’s pitting of Doreen.

Now, if I’d stepped on your toes in GD or something, I could understand being called into the Pit. But being called solely for my posting style? A posting style, moreover, which hasn’t changed substantially in nearly three years?

I’ve personally always thought that someone’s posting style is a really poor excuse for Pit rant, except when the poster in question is an obvious troll, or an obnoxious racist, or a whatever like Justhink who drives everybody crazy, universally. But I’m not a troll, I’m not a racist, I’m not a whatever like Justhink. I didn’t deserve a nine-page Pit Pileon, Jarbaby. :mad:

Are you happy about that anger, JarbabyJ, whoever you really are? Does it please you to know that the Person at the other end of those DDG pixels downstate in Decatur, a 47-year-old housewife and mother of three, really really hated you, whoever you are, for a couple of minutes there on a winter’s day in January 2003? Does it please you to know that you made a total stranger on the Internet go white with fury–at you? Does it amuse you? God help you if it does.

As soon as I read that OP, I knew perfectly well what was going to happen–in the next few minutes the whole yelling pack of Pitizens would be down on me like a duck on a June bug, slavering, posting filthy things, joining in the pileon with unholy glee. And indeed, that was exactly what happened. All those people who automatically open a Jarbaby Pit thread expecting to see a funny, savagely pointed OP got just what they wanted, a veritable feast. And to make it even yummier, Jarbaby was taking on the Google Queen herself, another longtime poster. Ladder Match in the Pit, folks, come one, come all. :rolleyes:

Somebody who was in straightdope chat at the time told me how it was over there–it was feeding time at the zoo. “Hey, everybody, catfight in the Pit, it’s Jarbaby and DDG!” Yet another reason, if any were needed, to stay out of straightdope chat. :rolleyes:

Now, Jarbaby, if I had seen this OP, even phrased exactly the way it was, and it had been coming from Cranky, or Wring, or Guin, or Persephone, or Primaflora, or Ultress, or Una, or Minty, or WeirdDave, or Fenris, or really, anybody except the Queen of the Pit, I would have given it thoughtful consideration. But as it was coming from you, I devoted several minutes to think of a way that I could hit you as hard as you had just hit me. I needed something that would leave you standing there with a stunned look on your face, same as me. The trouble is, you’re no slouch yourself at calling other people “leprotic crotch goblins” and whatnot, and I assumed that kindergarten insults like “fucking bitch” would just roll off. “Cunt” in 72 point type seemed like a good idea.

Hope it worked. I hope you sat there in shock for a minute, because that was exactly the way you made ME feel.

And I sincerely hope that the next time you feel impelled to post “constructive criticism”, in the Pit or anywhere else, to a collection of pixels, that you will take a minute to think about the human being who is on the other end of those pixels.

Somebody in the Pileon brought up the subject of “fairness”, said something like, “What, you expected it to be ‘fair’?”

Well, yeah, actually, I do. Here on this MB, as in Life, I expect to be treated the way I treat other people, and I treat other people here fairly, so I expect to be treated fairly myself. I don’t drag other people into the Pit for their posting style, and I don’t expect other people to do it to me.

However, I do forgive you. Really. :slight_smile: And I forgive all the other leprotic crotch goblins who posted howling goblin noise about me in your pileon. Really. :slight_smile:

Because–here’s the thing–the SDMB is not a unique place; there are lots of other message boards out there, and they’re all just like the SDMB. They all have posters just like you and me, lots of DDGs and Jarbabys, not to mention lots and lots of leprotic crotch goblins.

And all you people who are hearing that last remark as a snarky, “Oh, yeah, you SDMBers, you think you’re so special, well, you’re not, so there” can go get a pickle juice lollipop and a Chick tract and go sit in the corner with the other popsuckers. I’m not saying it to be snarky, I’m saying it because it’s the truth, and I just found out about it this weekend. And actually, I hope that none of the following comes out as sounding like a snarky, “The SDMB isn’t such hot stuff”, because I actually had a liberating experience this weekend, and I wish to share it.

I was prompted by Scotti’s Love and Understanding thread, where Lynn said:

I got curious about those other message boards, and what their versions of the Pit looked like. So I went looking.

Now, I already had quite a collection of other MBs in my Mom’s Message Boards Favorites folder, left over from the Bad Old Days of the Slow Server, when I would click on a thread and then go visit another website while I was waiting for it to load. But those had always been brief, lurking visits (so I’m not talking about Fathom and the Unaboard), and always, there was the inevitable comparison, “Well, it isn’t the SDMB, there’s nothing else on the Web quite like the SDMB…”

But this time, I was more thorough, and I went through all those old bookmarks, really reading the threads instead of just skimming, and I deliberately went Googling, looking for other message boards. And each time I found one, I sat there and read threads, asking myself, “Now, if I were a newbie, and I were thinking of registering here, what would I think? Is this a group of people that I’d be comfortable with?” I started out just looking for MBs that had “flaming” or “venting” forums, but then after a while I branched out into MBs in general. I spent a good deal of the weekend doing this, just sitting there reading threads on these other, alien MBs.

And after a while, I began to realize two very important and interesting things. When it came to “general interest” MBs (as opposed to the narrow-focus specialist/hobbyist MBs, who usually don’t have General Chitchat or Flaming Forums):

  1. They were all alike.
  2. They were all just like the SDMB.

There are a lot of other places just like the SDMB on the web. I’m not going to name them here, because they don’t deserve to have the slashdot type of invasion that we just had, but nearly all the MBs that I found that had General Interest and Flaming Forums–and even the special-interest MBs, if they had an Off-Topic Forum and a Venting Forum–had the same kind of people that we have here, the same voices, the same thoughts. Oh, sure, there was the occasional Napoleon’s EgoBuilder[sup]R[/sup] MessageBoard, and there were the MBs where nobody had posted in two years, but by and large, there were a lot of places that sounded just like the SDMB.

I actually started to get kind of weirded out at one point, because I thought, “This is eerie–there can’t be the same 20 people posting all over the Internet”, the resemblances were that uncanny. Each MB had the Gun Control Nut, the SUV Nut, the Atheist In Residence, the Partisan Politics Hobbyhorse, the Calm Voice Of Reason, the Compulsive Flirt, and on and on. It was really strange, I’d be reading a post and I’d wonder, “Tom~, is that you?” or, “Um…December?” but then I’d look at the Profile and it wasn’t them at all. This happened so many times that finally I realized that it’s going to be the same at any message board–you’ve got 10% Angels, 10% Assholes, and 80% Just Folks.

…

3

I think you shouldn’t go over there any more.
I mean, really!
Coffee!

4

All I can say is that that was a great analogy and I wish you hadn’t been treated so harshly before.

Haj

5

And, BTW, here’s a really weird thing. I ran across one MB that had an actual Junior Mod Wannabe, much worse than anything I was ever accused of, who ran around the forums posting, “DNFFT, people” and “You bumped this thread just to feed the troll, why did you do that?” She did it so often that I actually kept looking over at her name to see if it said Moderator, but it never did. And here’s the thing–nobody ever said a single word to her about it. Not a peep. I checked.

So then I realized, “Well, probably all those people are just saving it up, and some day, it’ll all come bursting out, and she’ll be standing there with a stunned look on her face, just like I was.” So somehow that made me feel better, that I wasn’t the only person on the face of the planet who apparently didn’t know that quite so many people on her message board found her irritating.

And all these MBs had versions of the Pit–and all their versions of the Pit were exactly the same as ours. They ALL had a certain amount of ugliness, but they all had a lot more of the medium-size, “Fuck! my car is broken!” and “Wal-Mart sucks” rants than the ugliness, the exact same way the Pit does.

I also saw that on other MBs there is the exact same dichotomy between, “we hold moderators to a higher standard” and, “our moderators are also posters here”. On a tropical fish hobbyist board, I saw a moderator join a flaming pileon in the middle of a General Care Information Forum. The subject was “whether to feed live goldfish to other fish”, and the mod, along with everybody else, lambasted Poster X, who had said that he didn’t see any problem with it, up one side and down the other, for cruelty to fish. And when Poster X complained, “Hey, you’re a moderator, it’s not fair for you to join in”, the Administrator came in and said, “He’s a poster here, too–he’s entitled to his opinions.”

And then the Admin went on to say, “If you don’t like the way we run the place, you can leave”, just the way Pitizens say it to people who start “The mods are jackbooted nazis” threads. (BTW, Poster X left that MB. I checked.)

Another interesting thing that I found on these other message boards is the way that unwanted emotion is transferred through the pixels. It’s a cliche to say “sarcasm doesn’t come through the pixels”. I would say that just the opposite is true–people are much more likely to read emotion into a post that isn’t there, than they are to miss emotion that was there.

The best example I saw this weekend was on one MB, where Poster A said something innocuous like, “Poster B doesn’t have to worry–he lives in Florida.” And Poster B went totally ballistic, “WTF is that supposed to mean? I can’t help it that I live in Florida!!” and he ranted on and on. The remark had obviously been meant as an offhand remark, but Poster B managed to read some deeper insult into it than had been intended.

So those people who say I come across as bossy, or pretentious, or supercilious–well, I guess that’s your problem, not mine. You’re reading way too much into my posts. If you want to interpret my “helpful advice” to a newbie as “bossy mod wannabe instructions”, that’s your privilege, but you might pause for a minute and try interpreting it as simply “helpful advice” before you start storing up resentment at that “bossy” poster.

And anyway, I began to realize that although the SDMB was a unique collection of people in 1999 and 2000, it isn’t anymore. (And all you people who are hearing that as “snarkiness” may pick up your lollipops and tracts on the way out…)

Back in Spring 2000, this MB was about evenly divided, in terms of number of threads and posts, between the “Fight Against Ignorance” forums (which were Comments, Staff Reports, which was called Mailbag, General Questions, and Great Debates, which I would count as Fighting Ignorance in the sense of debating the moon landing hoax, or things like homeopathy) and the General Chitchat Forums, which were MPSIMS and the Pit. The whole point of the Fight Against Ignorance forums was Getting the Straight Dope On Things, which meant providing cites and looking things up, besides just talking about them.

April 7, 2000. The Forum is Comments on Cecil’s Columns. Zenbeam wanted a picture of a bezoar. (The posts are badly scrambled, and the date stamps are messed up, too, from the switchover from UBB to VBulletin that month.)
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=2020&highlight=bezoar

I’d only been registered as Notthemama for two weeks, but already I’d discovered, to my joy, that the whole point of this Straight Dope website was “looking things up”. I LOVE looking things up. I got to work with AskJeeves, which at the time was the only search engine I was familiar with, being totally new to computers and the Internet. But by the time I’d found a picture of a bezoar with Jeeves, KimKatt and Cher3 had beaten me to it by many minutes. I was FURIOUS.

“Unregistered” (that’s me) says (originally it was in the middle of the thread):

The point here is that on that April day, there were, not one, not two, but three Dopers in Comments on Columns, looking stuff up for somebody else, Getting the Answers. That was the whole point of the Straight Dope Message Board–Cecil’s columns, and answering questions, and also Great Debating, to get to the bottom of the really important Big Questions like God and Death and Gun Control and homeopathy and the moon landings. MPSIMS and the Pit were just there because people felt a need to chitchat.

So I think that at that time, there truly was a unique collection of people here, who loved Facts, and Looking Things Up, and being skeptical about things like the paranormal and homeopathic healing, and debunking Urban Legends, and just generally Getting The Straight Dope. That many of them also happened to be smart and witty was just an added bonus, and I think it truly was a unique assemblage of people. If you went over to other MBs, the few that were in existence at the time, you’d find people just posting things like, “LOL!” to each other.

But people and the Internet change. I got on the Internet in January 2000 because Juno finally offered free Internet. Remember when the Internet was gonna be free, like radio and television, because advertising was gonna pay for it? Uh huh. :rolleyes: And here I am, paying $20 a month for AOL, a thing I swore I would never do…

And the Internet itself has changed, too. It’s grown up, matured, people have figured out how it works. And now that I’ve spent time actually reading what’s going on out there, I see that the SDMB is no longer unique. There are lots of other assemblages of smart, witty posters out there, on other message boards.

And I think that the SDMB itself has changed, that it’s somehow no longer devoted solely to Getting The Straight Dope on things. Ever since we added IMHO and Cafe Society, I think we’ve been quietly turning into just another General Interest Message Board. The General Chitchat forums now far outweigh the “Fight Against Ignorance” forums. Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing–just different.

The two Comments forums always were the quietest forums, but lately…sheesh. Has anybody been in there lately? I mean, literally. Has anybody been in there? I’ve always had my “Show Threads” set to “Show Last 2 Days” because the Forum defaults are for five (10?) days and when the boards were slow, it just took too long to load the main Forum pages, and I never got around to changing them back. So, “Show two days of threads” always used to show at least one page in both the Comments forums. But lately–geez, it’s usually only about a dozen threads in Columns and maybe five threads in Staff Reports. Obviously, nobody’s interested anymore.

And of the threads that were in there, at least half of them used to be started by Old Posters who had found information to update a column, or quibble with something Cecil had said, because they were reading columns in the archives, and about half of them were started by Single-Post Newbies who had obviously just registered in order to Comment On This Column. But nowadays, it seems like most of the threads in those two forums are started by the Single-Post Newbies. And a depressingly large number of them never seem to join in the general discussion, they never go over to other forums–they just post their comment and leave. Previously, Commenting On This Column used to serve as the entry level for a lot of posters, me included.

And I think the reason a lot of them don’t hang around is because nowadays the Internet offers so many other places to go, that they don’t need us.

And this is all very liberating for me (yes, I’m getting to the point), because all this time, I’ve felt like I was one of a diminishing group of people who were still carrying the Straight Dope “Fight Against Ignorance” banner. I always thought of the SDMB as something rare and precious, a priceless treasure that needed to be babied and coddled, and worried over. I sometimes felt like I was the only one who really still cared about the “old-fashioned” values, like Looking Things Up. “Doesn’t anybody care any more?” I would think, as I saw more and more people, for example, post questions and speculations in GD threads, but without bothering to go look it up themselves. Previously, they wouldn’t have dreamed of posting something like, “How many Twinkies does Brazil import every year?” because they would know that if they posted that, in a few minutes there would be three posters in a row coming back with the actual statistics, and they would lose face for not having looked it up themselves.

And I saw more and more people come into GQ and ask questions that previously, they wouldn’t have dreamed of asking without looking it up themselves first. I’m not saying that specific posters got sloppy, I’m saying that there was a general trend towards “go ahead and post it”, whereas previously the rule had been, “Check the Column archives, check the thread archives, check Snopes, check Google, and THEN post it.” And lately I don’t see that many people saying, which used to be fairly standard, “I did check the archives and I don’t see that this has been covered…”

So I sometimes thought I was the only one who still cared. But now that I realize that the SDMB was simply evolving into a different kind of message board, I feel very liberated. I don’t have to look stuff up any more. Aren’t you glad?

And–that question was a test of your pixel-reading skills. What emotion did you read into that statement?

  1. Aren’t you glad? :smiley:

  2. Aren’t you glad? :wink:

  3. Aren’t you glad? :rolleyes:

See what I mean?

6

I still love you DDG, and I surmise that lots of others do too.

I’ve been a GQ dweller for most of my short time here, and I’ve noticed a dramatic change in GQ since your pitting.

It’s a sort of anti-intellectualism, which is anathema to this board.

Come back to GQ in full force, please, DDG.

7

I didn’t post to that trainwreck of a thread, because there’s no arguing with piling-on Pitizens.

However, I just wanted to say that over the past two years, mainly as a lurker, I have always appreciated your presence and contributions. If you come across as a sort of benevolent old-timer on the look-out for newbies’ and the Board’s best interest- well, then, SO WHAT? More people should feel the same way, and act with such a balance of obvious caring on the one hand, and thoroughness, on the other.

To start a thread like that one, only to pretend later on to be shocked- SHOCKED, I say! that any offense could POSSIBLY be taken, is passive-aggressiveness at its finest.

And a former, self-admitted, attention-mongerer, then coming in to chastise others for the same perceived behavior, alluding to their own past and how they overcame a problem, and how they’re such a better person now- well, that whole thread reminded me a a recovering alcoholic who can no longer see someone with a drink in their hand without trying to shame them off the sauce.

Please don’t change for their benefit, DDG- there has been no official mod/admin ultimatum given to you, and those who criticized you earlier would be amongst the first to advise someone else: “Don’t click on my threads if you don’t like them,” or something clever like that.
Love ya, DDG, but it’s back to mainly lurking for this lowbie. :slight_smile:

-j

8

Thanks for the explanation of your position DDG.

Have a great week!

9

Duck

I read every word in your three parts. All the while, my heart ached for you. I so regret your emotional pain, and I pray that God will heal your heart and comfort you.

I never told you this before, and I don’t want it worrying you now, but I think it’s time to bring it up. Did you know that you were the reason I left the boards for several months in a state of deep depression? Are you surprised? You probably are.

I don’t still hold a grudge, and I honestly wouldn’t expect you to understand if I recalled the history for you. Besides, it’s water under the bridge.

I’d like to see you continue to pick up the coffee cups and make coffee. But I’d like to give you just a piece of advice for what it’s worth. When you’re picking up the cup of someone who is the object of the very sort of pile-on that made you cry, someone who has been hanging around the house for as long as you have, someone who is talking to the house owner directly — don’t wedge yourself directly between the person and the house owner and offer your opinion based on what little you’ve overheard.

God go with you and give you peace.

10

I have to say that, after that slugfest, I find that I don’t feel as safe here as I did. And considering how much and how often I turn to the Dopers for emotional support, that makes me sad.

I’m sorry, DDG. I still loves you, and I hope you will keep on keepin’ on. There is room for everyone, I believe, and if your posting style drives anyone to distraction, that is not your problem.

Best,
karol

11

and hopefully jars post lays that part to rest.

RE: the Jr. mod thing - did you read minty’s follow up in ATMB??? (genuine question, not an accusation :wink: )

now [large 50 point disclaimer here] IANAM[/large disclaimer], the ‘general sense’ that I got from that was a preference for qualifiers like “Generally speaking” (with link to rules), “IANAM, but it may be that…” vs. “This is clearly not a GQ”

Now, I am not saying that you do one vs. the other.

and I am most specifically not claiming that by using said qualifiers, other posters will stop the “who died and made you Jr. Mod” posts (as a matter of fact, it’s my personal opinion that for some folks, any mention of the rules or general board policies by anyone w/o the “moderator/administrator” tag would get that sort of response).

your analogy about the coffee klatch was similar to how I tried to 'splain it to some one.

12

DDG- I really didn’t want to post in that gigantic pile-on either, but I just wanted to say that I too have always appreciated your posts, and the way you stuck so well to the ‘Fighting Ignorance’ purpose of the board. I’m too much of a newbie to remember the good old days, but I do think it’s important that this board keeps that purpose in some way, and I really admire those posters like yourself that keep their focus more on the Anti-Ignorance forums.

13

DDG - I think the fact that Arnold posted a nice thing about your help far outweighs any member opinion of it (or even moderator opinion, given that Arnold is an admin).

I also feel that you were significantly and unfairly provoked in that Pit Thread. I am glad it has not put you off posting here.

14

Bitch, whine, moan.

15

PS I would be totally happy for anyone to pick through my coffee cups and clean up after me. Guests are generally forced to do it anyway, if they want a drink, as my only three mugs are usually lying about the place unwashed :wink:

I also thought it was good manners to help a host as much as possible, particularly someone you visit regularly. Their behaviour is appalling, not yours.

16

Did you see Lynn’s post on page 5 of jarbaby’s original thread? I read this as supporting Coldfire, so I don’t think he is the only one who holds the position.

(sorry, having problems linking directly to the post due to a browser problem)

17

Wow. Just wow.

18

I read every word of your post. I’m sorry you were hurt, and evidently very deeply. I probably cannot really know how much because I find that when I start to get involved enough with the board that I let the people hurt me I step back. It is hard to post your point conveying the correct amount of emotion and thought. Most of the time when my feelings have been hurt it stunned me because I didn’t realize that my post sounded the way it did. That hasn’t happened in a long while now. I don’t visit other message boards because I’ve been here long enough that I recognize lots of the posters and their styles and I’m comfortable for the most part with interacting with them. I’ve got some great friends on this board.
I did not join in the pile on because I respect both of you. We won’t even go into the story of jarbabyj because we had our differences when she first joined the board. That seems like a long time ago.
It’s easy to say get through this DDG, but that’s not so easy to do when you aren’t the person going through it. And as many other Dopers you feel that you’ve earned your space on this board. So keep it. Hold to it. And post on.

19

Post away, Ducky. And let the Hasturs of the world fall away like water off a . . . er, . . . duck’s back. :slight_smile:

20

What? You didn’t share the legal ramifications of DDG’s post and mine? I am shocked I tell you. Shocked!

We demand to drowned in your deluge of self-important egocentrism.