Originally Posted by VEGANGELICA

Yes, I agree with you that the argument raised in this thread is essentially that existing members should be especially polite to new members, who are more likely than established members to feel sensitive to possible heckling and rebuffed by comments that seem or are rude.

The bigger issue, I feel, is how MusicBanter members and mods want to uphold The First Rule of our community, especially when someone breaks it:

• While debating and discussion is fine, we will not tolerate rudeness, insulting posts, personal attacks, trolling, purposeless inflammatory posts or members deliberately provoking another member into committing any of these acts.

I feel that the best way to reply to rudeness is by being polite, since rude replies by members and mods violate the very rule that is supposed to be protected, encourage more rudeness, and discourage open sharing of opinions about music.

I think most of us here want MB to consistently encourage and facilitate the open sharing of opinions about music, but we may disagree on how best to achieve that goal.

Originally Posted by Urban Hat€monger ?

If I was doing what you wanted I would have given out an infraction for the thread starter when he started throwing his toys out of his pram when people didn't agree with him. That's in post No 57 BTW.

Instead I decided to post a reasonable response to his original question to which he first ignored and then dismissed out of hand when I made a point of mentioning it again he then continued with his insistence people were disagreeing with him for the sake of it.
I could have probably given him an infraction for that too for deliberately trolling.

But I didn't, why didn't I?
Because the guy was new and I didn't want to start hurling infractions at him on his first day here. Which ironically is totally at odds of your theory of us 'assimilating more forum visitors'. He chose to go down that road so we allowed him to, It's that simple really.

For the most part this is a laid back forum that lets is members be treated like adults, occasionally things might get a little out of control and that's where we step in. I don't see anything in this thread that's gets any worse than a little heated and I don't see anything worth infraction or banning anybody for.