Rules for the R'lyeh Forum

[Jackalope]

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.

Well... under the narrow definition of "personal attack", I'd have to say that the above don't exactly qualify. But, as you said, that's why we vote. :p

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?

Yes, of course. As I said to LastPoet after the thread was closed, much clarity comes with hindsight. At the time, the split was uncontroversial.

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.

Perhaps I didn't make my point clear - ultimately, I think splitting to R'lyeh should be done with caution. I would personally prefer to deal with incipient flame wars in-thread using other tools that we have and/or asking participants to create a thread in R'lyeh. I don't want to put someone in the position of being fair game for personal attacks by virtue of a post made outside of R'lyeh that was moved there, if they were not participating in the attacks. We don't allow members to snipe from R'lyeh at members who aren't posting there, nor should people who didn't post to a thread when it was *in* R'lyeh be subjected to attacks by virtue of (non-attack) posts being moved there.

What I'm saying, is that if we're going to split to R'lyeh, we ought to seek to reduce the collateral damage.

Then again, that's why we vote.