Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
He accused Cosmic of perpetrating a hoax by posting a photoshopped picture and claiming that it was real. I might have let that slide, except for the fact that if you Google "world's tallest Great Dane" or any combination of words that refer to this dog, you'll get an avalanche of hits. This photo has been posted in respectable newspapers, and the dog is in the Guinness Book of Records. And you can learn that by just reading the teasers in the Google list, without having to click on any of them.
If you're going to call someone a liar and a perpetrator of hoaxes, you had better do your homework first. Otherwise, it is a personal insult against another member, which is indeed a rule violation.
Several moderators spoke up about this and they unanimously disagreed with my action. However, most of them did not think that an insult had not occurred, merely that it was perhaps not quite bad enough to merit a ban. Another thought I was punishing him just for being wrong. Nonetheless they all thought I was within my rights to issue the ban, merely being too rigorous.
The general feeling was that if we start enforcing the rules that rigorously, we'll be doling out one-day bans to half the members, and it would be more work than the unpaid volunteer part-time moderators could handle. My response to that is that if we'd just get down to business and start enforcing the rules that rigorously, we might see a vast improvement in the civility of the discourse around this website, as befits one that is supposed to be a place of science and scholarship. And we'll end up with less work.
I guess I can't complain about that detail. I started it by not understanding that it wasn't Cosmic's dog.
You accused him twice of posting a Photoshopped picture and trying to pass it off as genuine. That's an insult where I come from.
I readily confess to being drawn into this thread because I'm a dog lover. I also readily confess that I was confused by the absence of quotation marks. I accept the fact that you were not insulting Cosmic for claiming that he personally owns the world's tallest dog, because you weren't led astray by the punctuation error. Nonetheless, you were insulting Cosmic for claiming that the picture he posted was of the world's largest dog, and you accused him of perpetrating a hoax. That's still an insult and it's still a rule violation.
If I had known that it wasn't Cosmic's dog, perhaps I would not have bothered with the ban. But now that it's done neither I nor any of the other moderators believe that it should be reversed, since you did in fact insult another member.
As I said above, perhaps you (and all the other members who are reading this) will think twice next time before making such a serious accusation without checking your facts first.
Do you expect everyone you insult spuriously to be as benign about it as he was? Next time just do your own homework. Don't be so lazy.
What do you call this series of posts? You have turned an interesting thread about dogs into a whine fest about poor little you.
* * * * I wonder if I've collapsed two posts into one and am responding to the wrong person. If so, please change "you" to "him" etc. Sorry, I the day is ending and I have to close this so I can't fix it right now. * * * *
The consensus of the moderators was that this ban was not undeserved, merely unusual.
Fortunately I don't run into those kinds of things in real life. If it starts to happen more often here, I'll have to improve my skill at dealing with children.
By the time I got back here, the ban was about to expire so there was no point. Unlike some of our members I have a real life to attend to out in the carbon world. If it were longer than one day I would have checked for feedback and responded appropriately.
Again I apologize to you because you're feeling guilty over something that was done on your behalf without your consent. Next time I'll be more careful. Sometimes a learning experience is the best that can come out of a bad situation.
We all help Enmos out because this is a high-traffic subforum and it's not easy for one person to handle it.
Au contraire. I am enforcing the standards that we already have. This is supposed to be a place where people come to learn, not to see the members throwing poop at each other like chimpanzees.
That is unfortunately so easy that sometimes it's almost unavoidable.
Even though I scored 140 on the Mensa test, I'll let that personal insult go by without issuing another ban. I don't promise to do the same next time.
No. It's got too high a profile and too many moderators have been involved. We won't let that happen.
I'm not apologizing. He broke the rules by insulting another member and he was banned for it. You kids need to grow up and stop acting like middle-school.
Works for me. After the last time I went to that board and discovered a thread named after me, I vowed never to return.
