Mod Hat — Response (final)
Ophiolite said:
So how am I meant to know what behaviour of mine was unacceptable in this thread if the evidence is gone?
If I was worried about the behavior, I would have said something.
As it is, what is gone is a string of six posts all related to an insult. When we edit content or delete posts, we also try to remove subsequent references to the offense. The entire digression is peripherally related, and only existed in that context.
In doing so, I would argue that you make it all the more difficult for anyone to learn what constitutes offensive posts and you can take away some good points as well.
You haven't done anything wrong. I'm just cleaning up a little mess.
So, physician, calm thyself. It's not the end of the world.
You seem to be suggesting that 5 posts were deleted for the sake of one. I have all 6 posts on my hard drive (I've gotten used to this type of thing happening on occassion and I dislike not being able to see what fusses are about when I have actually written one of the deleted posts, so I tend to save a lot of pages where I've written something on my hard drive).
I'm hoping that I can atleast briefly outline what the posts had in them in order to make my point. I won't mention the names of either the insulter or the insultee. Here goes:
The 1st had the insult and insulter in question. The 2nd involved the insultee correcting the spelling of the insulter and then going on in his usual inflamatory style. Ophiolite, who I suspect especially likes to correct spelling, joins in on the correction of spelling trend in the 3rd (no f words were involved). The 4th involved me correcting a spelling mistake of Ophiolite's
. The 5th involved me finding 2 words used by the insultee's inflamatory part of his post to be particularly amusing when the rest of the sentence is removed and the 6th involved me responding to the meat of the insultees' inflamatory part of his post.
Post 1, I think, should have been made an example, not deleted- as in, this is what you should -not- do. Post 2 was inflamatory, but as you seem to be implying, within acceptable limits, as you only mention the initial post as the cause of all the trouble. Post 3 and 4 were fluffy posts not really concerned with anything but spell checking and relatively harmless. Post 5 may have been somewhat humorous but I think that it had a very good point to it as well. And I feel that post 6 had some very good points indeed (what can I say, I wrote it ;-)). And all gone because someone used the f word and used another lesser insult for good measure. I'd like to believe that your relative silence when I've mentioned many times that the f word was probably the cause of the initial post deletion points towards the fact that the f word used as an attack is generally unnaceptable. That, atleast, would mean that something was actually -learned- here instead of a bunch of posts being deleted because you felt that something in the first of the bunch had something 'beyond the pale' (which I agree with, although I happen to know that you've used an f word derivative insult against a poster in the past, although you were speaking of him, not to him in the past, and pointed out to you that I felt you were going a little over the top) and the rest of the posts (only the first of which was even responding to the insulter in question) must therefore be wiped out as well.