ooshi, is there a reason for your hostility towards me while I'm expressing my honest opinion regarding the enforcement of a given rule? I don't remember being negative towards you, ever. My posts generally don't cause flamefests, though, it seems like you're attempting to start one in this thread for whatever (ironic) reason. Yes, people who flame other people over whether or not they like something that happened in one piece are acting stupid.
Just so you know though, if you post, "It's rather disappointing that x happened" and people make idiotic posts in response, it's not your fault, it's their's. You have an interesting conception of what makes someone ride the 'short bus'.
Now to the only serious response I got.
Well, that's always the tricky part, because generally what happens is someone says something and it starts a chain reaction that lasts for several pages. It's not just a few stray comments here and there. If it was, it wouldn't be such an issue. If everyone could learn to just be…not so much of a jerk the way they express their opinions, think a little more before they post rather than posting just for the sake of posting, and know when to just ignore some people, then we wouldn't need to do much of anything to the thread.
I understand your frustration there, and I realize that you guys just want to prevent the forums from going to hell. Perhaps I'm just used to a different style of moderation, and so dislike yours. That's not to say anything negative about you guys, as I have a great time at these boards in general, so you must be doing most everything right. It's just that, at the forum I moderate, which is somewhat larger than this one (though it's a different kind of forum so I can easily understand the need for a different kind of moderation), we don't ban the discussion on anything unless it creates a legal risk for us, and we just clean up the messes when they arrive. If people are discussing things intelligently, we'll gladly delete even a dozen crappy posts so that they can at least continue the discussion that they were trying to have. Our philosophy is that that is exactly what moderation is.
Anyway, I understand your position and I thank you for explaining it to me so clearly, Cosmic Debris. Agreeing to disagree respectfully,
Worm