Rules for the R'lyeh Forum

[Rayaan]

I think it's important to note what differentiates "personal attacks" (allowed in R'lyeh) and "flaming" (which is not).

Certainly ... although the line between "personal attacks" and "flaming" might be a little blurry.

That's why we make votes, hehe.

Personally, if a post consists solely of a personal attack with no argument - it's flaming, otherwise it's not necessarily.

Well, then, I've seen many posts that only have a personal attack with no argument; posts that simply include a statement such as "Asshole," "Fuck you "Bitch," "Idiot," "Fuck off," "Kill yourself," "Go fuck yourself," "You are a disgusting person," or something along those lines (i.e. just a personal attack with no arguments at all), but oftentimes we didn't do anything to the author of those posts.

I think that a lot more people would have been banned by now if that is what we accepted as an example of flaming, as you described above.

Furthermore, there were some of us who felt that the thread should have been split to a forum that did not have R'lyeh's protection from the personal attack rule.

That was much later, though, right?

Consider this: anyone who posts in a R'lyeh thread is fair game. Is someone who posted to Off Topic, and later had his post split to R'lyeh fair game when they were not involved in the activity that led to the split? I think they should not be. If members want to voluntarily create threads in R'lyeh, that's fine.

Fair game or not, the important thing is that the same rules should apply for every member/participant in the R'lyeh, whether someone voluntarily created the threads in the R'lyeh or we moved it there.

Just because we split and moved a post to the R'lyeh doesn't mean that original poster is not "fair game" anymore, because the rules haven't changed where we moved it to.

I think that R'lyeh is an appropriate place to split a thread when all involved are mutual combatants. That wasn't the case here.

Even if that was not the case, it doesn't matter because the R'lyeh is basically a place for heated and/or controversial threads as written in the description of that forum. Most of the threads in R'lyeh, however, were not even intended to start heated arguments with mutual combatants, which is alright, so it's not necessary that everyone posting in that area have to be mutual combatants.

Plus, there will almost always going to be at least some members who desire to have a non-offensive/non-combative and a rational discussion, so I think it would be very unlikely for you to come across even a single thread that meets your criteria for splitting to R'lyeh that "ALL involved are mutual combatants."

I believe that we waited too long to split the thread, and that we split it to the wrong place. For my part in that, I apologize.

I don't accept your apology ... because I don't think that any of that was a mistake in the first place.