[Zetack]

I think one tends to forget, because their books are so dispasionate and rational, that sklanksy and malmuth are people with (pretty big) egos and the all to human propensity to see internet posts as more inflamatory than they are and as much ability to get into a flame war as anybody else. I was reminded of that after following the link in the other thread to the Lee Jones thread, in which both sklanksy an mason made posts that were supringly low brow and attacky.

We give them a lot of props because we admire their work so much. Unfortunately they have less appealings sides (as do we all) as well and sometimes we get to see that. Unfortunately for those of us who like being here, in any disagreement they get to carry a bigger stick that we do.

In my opinion, and it's certainly true that its not my site and the site owners can do whatever they want with it, I think banning and even post deleting should be reserved for behavior that is truly egregious, not merely mundanely insulting, obnoxious or strident.

Repeated violating behavior and truly abusive (and not merely insulting or derogatory) ought to be the standard of the day. In the interests of a lively, vigorous, wide ranging, and yes, at times downright snarky discourse I would like to see banning and deleting as a very infrequent, nuclear bomb type action.

That's just my 2+2 cents of course.

--Zetack


edit: And quite frankly, I've seen so many posts about Moderators behavior that its quite surpassed "online poker is rigged" and "small sample size"posts as my least favorite topic and the incredibly proliferation of these posts seems to me to be a pretty good symptom indicating that the moderators as a group are too hands on in their moderating activities. In the end, man, its all just words, most of the time you can just let it slide...