It has been apparent for some time now that insulting other members has become common place when arguments in the coffeehouse escalate. Countless threads with a promising start have eventually devolved into competitions between opposing viewpoints to see who can use the most ad-hominem attacks. Not only is this a blatant violation of the rules which often goes unchecked, but it obstructs constructive conversations, creates animosity between users, and hurts feelings. Therefore, I propose the following: When posting in the coffeehouse, the offense of insulting others is raised to a second tier offense, discouraging people from further breaking the rule, as well as insuring that repeat offenders are quickly banned. However, when the first non-constructive insult is posted in a thread, a moderator shall post a warning, and the user who threw the first insult shall have 1 point on their record. People who respond to the first insult with another insult before a moderator posts a warning will be excused, as they were provoked. All insults within that thread after the warning post will be a 2 point offense.
Seems pointless as people will just insult eachother anyway. You might as well try to stop Pre-Marital Sex. Also, people don't care about insults, even the most alert mods, until they've escalated. In other words, it's a system that looks good on paper but will not succed in practice.
If this gets passed then you'll be the first to start racking up infractions. "lol leftists are clearly just no-life losers."
Mods don't enforce the rule because there are no specific guidelines to do so. This proposal provides these guidelines as well as improving the rule. Also, if this passes and it ends up having no effect, we won't lose anything in the process, so we should at least try.
This is 100% true. The deal with insults is for the most part we wait for the insulted user to report it. In certain extreme cases we may not. Sorry for pulling a quote from the mods corner Kal but it's appropriate here.
Yup... So you guys know this is actually something we've been talking about this week. But as always we'd love to hear what yall have to say /insomnia sucks
You guys are missing the point with the mod enforcement point. The main reason i brought this up was to punish people who derail coffeehouse threads with insults.
I don't see why this couldn't be brought into line with current rules. Seems to me that you can still make Insults in the Coffee-house a second-tier offense, but maintain the law, which is in some ways not sensible, that the insult is defined by the insultee. Personally I think you have to have subsections to defining an insult (1) The pursuer declares himself to be so insulted, desciribing the manner to the court. (insulitng in the specific) (2) The Court must then decide if a reasonable person would have found such statement to be insulting (insulting in the general) (3) The court should take into consideration when deliberating under Subsection 2 above the particular circumstances and views of the pursuer as regards special sesnitivities and any other reasonable reason put forward as to why this may be insulting in the specific but not in the general, in which case section subsection 2 above shall be deemed fulfilled for the requirments of subsection 4 below. (4) if the conditions of both sections 1 and 2 above are found to be then the statment shall be declared an insult and subject to whatever justice deemed neccesary by the court, in accordance with the rules for infractions as laid out in the rules of this site. edit On looking over the rules again it really needs to be tidies up and just generaly made better to read and understand what leads to what specificaly. I would propose that doing so would make it clearer what powers and responsibilities mods have, and end the continual bitching that some people have abot mod "corruption". Or at least abate it.
