The Constructive Ideas Thread

[Urban Hat€monger ?]

Originally Posted by VEGANGELICA

Here is our community's first rule, for reference:

• 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.

^ This is the one sentence that is supposed to prevent escalating hostilities on the site. It's open to a lot of different interpretations and can be context-specific and subjective. I recommend that mods and the community decide roughly what they feel constitutes "rudeness, insulting posts, personal attacks, trolling, purposeless inflammatory posts, or members deliberately provoking another member into committing any of these acts," because at present it isn't clear where the lines are.

For example, currently we don't have any rule specifically against name-calling. Usually I see mods calling people out for using name-calling.

Is calling someone a troll an example of name-calling? If not, why not?

There is no rule that we like each other here, but I interpret the intention of the first rule at MB as meaning that we should be civil with each other when we disagree. For me, that means criticize ideas but don't call people derogatory names because of their ideas.

You can always still say them in your mind even if you don't say them to the person directly. That's what I do!

We do act on blatant name calling, as soon as someone does it they're either warned to tone it down or given an infraction.

The problem isn't that we're not acting on this, the problem is people are exploiting grey areas to get away with it.

Let's say for example you post something and I reply 'I don't think you know what you're talking about' then gone of to say why and then ended the post saying 'LOL Vegans' I've not actually done any namecalling, I've also gone on to say why I disagree with you in the proper way, some might say the post is hostile in nature but others might say I'm just giving my opinion and that the little thing at the end is a harmless joke.

We're not psychic we don't know if people are going to respond well or badly to a joke and to eliminate any doubt we'd have to ban the whole forum from doing it.