My being nominated as a moderator has as much to do with availability as anything. There are several more "deserving" players on this site in my opinion of holding an important and high status on this site, but I don't consider this an elevation of my status on the site at all. Rather, it's just extra time I take to check various things throughout the day and respond to queries where I can. I don't expect anyone to see me as anything more than a player and a forum member unless it's over the email.
I understand your point, ssorenn, and in the past I would have agreed with you entirely. It's only in the last couple of months that I shifted slightly away from the mindset that anything goes on this forum no matter how ugly it might be. I agree with you in this way - you should be able to call people out as the "scum of the earth" on here, so long as you don't harass them in doing so. I'm not entirely clear on what went down with dirge's thread, but if it were up to me I probably wouldn't have taken any action on that thread. Obviously, though, it's not up to me.
I'll try to use a couple of examples of what does and doesn't cross my personal line, and then I'll clarify something else.
threadID=1162393 clearly calls out a player, and though it's not really clear what the point of the thread was, it's obviously not malicious. If anything, it was a joke. In
threadID=1163140, there's a pretty obvious intention to call attention to another player's views on another topic, which in general I think is fine, but (again, if it were up to me) the reason I'd support locking that thread is specifically because there's another topic. There was no need to make an entirely new thread to call attention to something said in another, because you could just as easily do that in the other thread. As we all saw pretty quickly, creating new topics in the Israel/Palestine "series" we had going for awhile for the sole purpose of calling attention to something already said in another thread got out of hand and we ended up nearing 10 threads over a single topic. This is spam, and I use this thread as an example of calling someone out in a way that could have just as easily been done in another thread, which would allow us to have more productive discussions rather than a single unproductive one.
I'll give another example.
threadID=1157627 called out a player, but obviously, there was nothing malicious about it. There was no harassment (which, to clarify, goes past a simple attack on a person) and the topic wasn't extended from another thread - it was just a thread encouraging discussion with attention specifically given to another player that the OP knew was likely to be interested in the topic at hand. Nothing wrong here.
Another thread that I see as spam as an extension of another topic is
threadID=1154290. I don't think this thread was anything more than a joke, and it calls out two players, but I don't think it's anything near harassment toward either of them. However, it was an extension of
threadID=1154717, and the topic could have easily been settled there - ergo, it's spam.
I didn't specifically look for harassment, but any personal threats of violence (i.e. death, rape, assault, etc.) are well beyond that line, and while I don't mind if you call someone out as the "scum of the earth" once, doing so over and over again when it's clear that a) you've gotten your point across, and b) they're offended by your continued persistence constitutes harassment in my book. That's all hypothetical, of course.
Hopefully that's helpful. This isn't an official policy, just my view on things as they are now, and hopefully we can clear up the fuzzy line sooner rather than later.
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Classic game needs three more
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