--- In [email protected], "Rick Archer" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: <snip> > Point 1, below, includes the following: "Please refrain from > personal attacks, insults..." Since a few members habitually > ignore this guideline, we're going to try putting some teeth > in it. On a trial basis, those who can't refrain from "flaming" > (personal attacks) or indulge in gratuitous profanity or sexist, > racist, etc. slurs will be banned for a week, 2nd offense 2 > weeks, etc.
(FWIW, I won't be "reporting" anybody, publicly or privately.) Since this is a very different kind of rule than the posting limit rule, in that the number of one's posts is pretty much cut-and-dried whereas this new rule is very much a matter of individual subjective judgment, I would *strongly* recommend that you do a test drive for at least two weeks during which you give people who have been "reported" a public warning, quoting the offensive part(s). That way we'll get to see what you consider offensive. Hopefully if anybody disagrees with a particular offense, we can all discuss it publicly. We should also be informed when a warning is the result of a private "report." The snitch can remain anonymous. (I've been on a few forums where there were rules against flaming, and in all cases nobody was ever banned without a warning, so I would recommend this as a permanent feature of the rule: first offense gets a warning, second offense a ban goes into effect.) There are three major problems I see with such a rule. The first is the subjective nature of the judgments. Is it flaming to tell somebody they need to be checked, when it's obviously meant as an insult rather than a suggestion for improving the quality of their meditation? If I point out that someone has said something that is not true and don't call them a liar but add "as you know" to the correction, is that considered flaming? What about a flame in which the flamee is not named, e.g., "Some people on this forum..."? How clear does it have to be who the intended flamee is before it's considered a personal attack? And how about a flame followed by a smiley face? How do you determine whether the smiley face is genuine? Is it a flame to laugh at somebody when the person is being quite serious? The second problem is related. There are lots of ways to put a person down without being explicit, e.g., without saying "You moron!" The folks on this forum who tend to be the most personally critical (and I include myself) are pretty good at implicit flaming, which may give them an unfair advantage. The third problem is that once a person has been banned, there are some here who are likely to attempt to exploit the person's absence by criticizing them, even saying things about them that are blatantly false, when their target can't respond right away. This *could* be prevented, perhaps, by a rule that a person who has been banned can't be talked about in their absence (but see above about flaming without naming the flamee). Basically, as others have pointed out, the overall problem with a rule against flaming is that the only way to make it fair is to make it complicated; and this type of complexity tends to generate still more complexity. You can't legislate that people like and respect each other. You can't stop them from expressing negative feelings about others; you can only impose an arbitrary subjective standard about *how* they do so. The bottom line is that the group whose behavior you're trying to improve will become more and more like the TMO.
