Just curious, what happens in this scenario?
[ul]
[li]Spammer posts a thread whoring some streaming video site.[/li][li]Doper A reports thread, posts “Reported” [/li][li]Doper B calls doper A a naughty word[/li][li]Doper C insults the spammer in a way that clearly breaks board rules[/li][li]Doper D posts a direct link to an offensive image[/li][li]Mod arrives, deletes (or disappears) thread.[/li][/ul]
Do any of dopers B, C and D still get a warning, even though the thread has gone?
The traditional practice is that Doper C does not get warned. I don’t remember seeing Doper B or Doper D scenarios happening in spam threads.
I’ve never warned any doper in an obviously spam thread. I doubt that my colleagues have either.
Thanks.
I feel the need to add: I’m not looking for license or opportunity to break the rules, BTW - just idly curious.
Does that mean that anything goes in a obviously soon-to-be-deleted spam thread? What fun! Let the expletives fly! Release the hounds!!
You don’t waste a decent slab of spam on hounds!
Sure. Knock yourself out.
That’s what he wants you to do. The catch is “Soon to be deleted spam thread”
When you let fly how do you know it will be deleted? samclem is sitting in his secrecy lair with his jackboots on just waiting. Waiting for you to let fly in a thread you believe will be deleted. Then he has your ass. *
Suckup noted. 
While I agree with Sam that I have never issued Warnings to subsequent posters in a thread that was clearly a spam thread, I would note that if the thread had been open long enough that Doper B’s name calling had gotten the attention of Doper A and a fight had broken out, I would reconsider that decision.
I don’t issue warnings for insults against spammers if I’m deleting the thread. I generally give a pass against obvious trolls too. But you shouldn’t take anything for granted.
Like tom, I could consider issuing a warning if a poster insulted another regular poster in a spam thread, but don’t recall any such case.
If someone deliberately tried to take advantage of the situation to take a poke at another poster as prr suggests, I would probably issue a warning.
What Colibri said. The fact that the thread is going to the cornfield doesn’t excuse obvious violations of the rules.
Ain’t no free pass, ladies and gentlemen.
An additional rationale: If new posters see a thread (even an obvious spam thread) in which one poster insults another, they’ll think that insults are OK. All it takes is that they see the thread in the time between the Report and the actual disappearance of the thread.
So, while I probably wouldn’t warn a poster for insulting a spammer, I would not want to enshire that behavior as an acceptable exception to the rules. Most of us don’t want more rules. Seems to me that making a specific exception to the rules, well, that’s still expanding the rules, isn’t it? – that is, it expands the amount of reading that one must do to learn the rules.
And, IMHO, insulting another poster (not the spammer) is still NOT OK, even if the thread is going to disappear. It can be many hours before a spam thread is caught – and sometimes, there’s ambiguity about whether an OP is really a spammer or just a naive newcomer.
So we’ve gone full circle here, in less than a day, from Samclem’s invitation to “Knock yourself out” dishing out expletives and insults in spam threads to the usual crowd of Mods issuing notice that such behavior is prohibited by law and shall result in the severest of possible sanctions.
Good job!
I did NOT say “severest of possible sanctions.” I said it was still a rules violation, but there is some room for leniency (Mod Report? Friendly Admonishment? Official Warning? Banning?) in how to deal with it. Since the mods do seem to have different attitudes, we probably need to discuss behind the scenes. There’s no surprise that different mods have different approaches to a hypothetical that hasn’t happened, so we’ve never discussed it before.
I was enjoying the use of hyperbole, of course–I don’t imagine you would EVER employ the severest possible sanctions, which would be what? Hunting down posters IRL and murdering them in cold blood, plus their families and loved ones?
But it’s good to know that no one will ever be banned for interjecting into a spam thread all sorts of insults and expletives, and that you’re vowing always to employ some lenient form of action for violations in spam threads. Thanks for the clarification!
If we honestly think a thread is going to be deleted but turn out to be mistaken, can we still go hog wild?
Why do you have to violate the rules in the first place?
Whether the thread stays public or not is not the issue. It doesn’t say in the registration agreement that stuff only counts if a certain number of people see it.
Spam threads are not free passes to be a jerk.
It looks to me like they’re formulating their ideas on the fly in front of us instead of using email. This is something kind of obscure that they hadn’t considered before. Seems reasonable to me as does the solution. They’ll bend the rules a bit in a spammer thread so long as one doesn’t take advantage and act like a complete ass. Yes, they did a very good job.
Just for the record I do remember a very obscene spammer that I let it have it, no strong swearing words, but it was a riff on what Kryten from Red Dwarf said as I knew that thread was going to disappear:
http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0017430/quotes
I replaced the lines to reflect that it was a thread in a message board and replaced Rimmer with “dirty spammer” and instead of “image fades” it was “thread fades” IIRC, so yeah, I did not get a warning after the thread was taken to oblivion.