[BruceZ]

No, not the thread for political moderates; far be it for me to host that. I mean that we should put posts about forum moderation here in order to get them out of the root causes of terrorism, since they are not exactly the same.

First of all, relax. I am not making any change to the rules which have not been in place site wide since day 1. There are very few hard and fast rules on this site, but one of them has always been that everyone on this site has a right to participate in any of the forums without being personally insulted or personally disrespected.

Now what I gather from some of your responses is that many of you wish to give up this right. That is fine; however, doing so will not allow you to insult others who wish to retain their right. If any user feels he has been insulted, that user needs only contact a moderator. If the insult is deemed over the line, it will be deleted. If the offender is an obvious troll (new username, all posts are insults or spam) then that offender will be banned immediately. If the offender has other posts which are not in violation, then the offender will receive a warning. If he continues to make insults which require deletion, then the offending username will be banned. If the offender returns with another username and is identified as the same user, the new username will be banned as well. This is how I’ve operated all along, though thus far the only offenses have been obvious spam.

A couple of long time users were given warnings yesterday, and a clear insult was deleted from one of their posts. I don’t expect to have to ban these people. I expect that the insults will stop.

For example, you cannot refer to a user as “that paragon of bigotry”. This is not going to happen. You also cannot refer to one as a “stubborn mule who cannot see past the end of his wet little nose”. This latter case is made especially egregious when it is said about a highly respected member of this community, during an argument for which the offended party is a world class authority, who knows more about the topic under discussion than the insulter could ever hope to understand in his lifetime. To be fair, if the world class authority were to call the other guy a “troll”, the world class authority would also be reprimanded if the “troll” requested it. However, the danger of this situation is what if the world class authority were the type of person whom we might risk losing as a contributor because of this offense? I will do whatever is in my power to ensure that doesn’t happen.

Now that doesn't mean that you can’t insult or disrespect people’s ideas or arguments. Feel free to insult and disrespect those all you want. It is only when one insults not ideas or arguments but individual users that it is clearly over the line.

When I used to inspect software, we had a simple rule. When we found an error, we would say "the program is doing this [incredibly stupid thing] here". That was fine. We could not say "the author of this program is an idiot because of this error he made here". See the difference? That's all I'm talking about here.

This leaves plenty of leeway for vicious attacks on one's ideology and thought processes. The only attacks it excludes are ones which simply attach a negative label to someone in lieu of debating his ideas. These serve no purpose to anyone, and are the product of weak minds and weak arguments. We don’t lose a thing by disallowing this type of attack.

To a poster who stated that “misquoting is not slander”, I responded “Sure, this coming from someone who stated that ‘child molestation is great and should be encouraged’”. To those for whom this was a complete woooosh hair job, my intention here was that this depends upon what the misquote implies about the person being misquoted, as well as to whether this is intentional. This was in regard to a specific thing, and I don’t expect it to become a general issue. My apologies to Niss if this was misinterpreted. I thought it was clear what I was doing, but apparently not. Clearly his reaction proved that misquoting can most certainly be slander (or libel).

I also fully intend to comply with this rule myself from this point on, so you can knock off trying to point out cases where I didn’t, because you will be wrong by definition. If I post it, then it isn’t a personal insult for which I would reprimand anyone else.

We are not going to have a legal document that defines a personal insult. The final judgment of what is clearly over the line will be left to the moderators. We were made moderators because Mat feels that our judgment about what is acceptable and what isn’t happens to correlate almost perfectly with his own. It is my full intention that any actions I take as a moderator will be viewed by Mat as reasonable. So to those of you who implied that I hold some type of personal grudge, you have nothing to worry about. They won’t affect my actions as moderator, and you can be sure that if any action is taken against you by me, it will be for completely objective and legitimate reasons.