Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Yes. That's our job.
We don't allow insults against individual members or racial slurs. I personally don't allow insults against science unless they're in the proper subforum like philosophy where it's legitimate to debate the validity of science; otherwise this is a place of science and that's why we all come here. Other types of insults can be tolerated in the spirit of animated discourse, bearing in mind that most of our members are children who can't be expected to always behave like demure adults.
If there's a disagreement then there should be a debate. The rules of debate should be followed, in which each party responds to the points made in the previous post. In general I enforce the scientific method, even in discussions of politics and dating advice: Every assertion is, in effect, being peer reviewed by the other people on the thread. If it is found to be extraordinary, then the person who made it must stop pressing his argument forward and provide extraordinary substantiation when requested. Since this is SciForums, any assertion of the type, "I know that what the experts are telling us is wrong and you're all fools to believe them," is automatically extraordinary. Say some damfool thing like that twice without backing it up meticulously, and I'll ban you myself.
When people just keep saying "I'm right and you're wrong," or repeating the same statements with only slight changes in wording, then the thread has been hijacked. I need to see some new ground covered, at least slowly. And if people repeatedly make statements with high emotional content and little substantiation, which have the effect of eliciting angry responses, without stopping to substantiate them when called on, that is trolling,.
In my opinion both parties should be banned then or neither.