It's not the words, PF. Most of us have a pretty good idea of what words are unacceptable. I think that we mistakenly came here thinking we had reached heaven and all nasty discourse and discord would be gone and we wouldn't have anyone here that wanted to cause trouble with us. I sort of had an epiphany about that recently: Moderating can't fix everything. And we certainly don't need or want to be moderated to death. If the moderator or moderating panel throws out an infraction or a suspension or a banning for every little thing, then this board is going to die a quick death.
What has to happen is that we need to grow up a bit. We have to take responsibility for ourselves and not do some things, but most of all, we need to keep the thick skin we developed over on that other board that died. We have it. But some of us must've thrown it away when we got here.
There are always going to be people who like to push our buttons. So what? So we go running to Dave crying "ban him!!" Sheeesh. WTH are we thinking? Do we need to do that? Are we big babies or something?
Moderating has to be there on the table because some people push the envelope to the point that something must be done. But really, that's all that moderators need to do.............take care of those egregious instances and people. Dave and Chris need help in moderating because so many of us are turning in all sorts of little line crossing episodes that should be ignored. And some of us are about to explode because we don't want to get into trouble for fighting back when we are attacked............so we just walk away from posts that attack. And that's not fun.
Notice that I haven't even addressed those who attack. I won't do that. They are who they are. They do what they do because they get some perverse pleasure from it. We cannot change them. We can just make ourselves impervious to their attacks.
I don't have the perfect answer (yet). But I do know that we need a thicker skin around here. We can't control the attackers, but we can put that thick skin that's impervious to attacks back on. It's needed.
