I think there's a prohibition against announcing your departure from the forum. I never really understood that, because if someone quits, they aren't going to care if they break any rules or if said departure announcement gets deleted.
Alex created our rules list by importing it from another forum that he knew the admin of, and we've modified it from there. This is one of the rules that was on the original list. As far as I know, we've never actually enforced it per se, because as you mentioned, there's really not a lot that can be done other than locking or deleting the thread. But it's there to deter drama queen exits ("you wronged me, and the admins wronged me, and this forum sucks, so I'm leaving!").
But people develop relationships outside the forum and as much as they have tried to in the past, the mods can't regulate behavior elsewhere. (You may remember that they tried to ban me for a Facebook post.)
They didn't try to ban you for a Facebook post, they tried to ban you for advocating for actions to be taken by third parties against a member here which could have jeopardized the member's safety. The technicality that kept you from getting banned was that the place you chose to advocate for it was on Facebook.
I know I have been told privately by one forum regular -- someone who has contributed to the base of roadgeek knowledge for years, maintained highway construction and history websites, participated in just about every forum that has ever existed (MTR, the Yahoo groups, various Facebook groups and pages) -- that he won't be back. He got tired of getting warnings, suspensions, having posts deleted, when those who posted opinions on certain projects that were in opposition to his opinion on the projects weren't dealt with similarly. He also thinks there were other factors that may have contributed to his treatment. He certainly didn't find this forum a welcoming place; he felt he was being pushed away because of his views on roads and other things.
If it's the person I'm thinking of, probably for the best—we were getting tired of issuing warnings and suspensions and deleting his posts. And posting opinions isn't what causes moderator action, it's the manner in which they're posted—if I post an opinion, someone else posts an opinion in opposition to my opinion, and then I post "You're wrong, fuckface, and also I bet you're a jaywalker" then yeah, I'm probably not going to be treated the same as the people in opposition to me. Furthermore, because we try to avoid publicly posting when individual users are specifically sanctioned to avoid undue public shaming, he has no idea
what we did to the other users involved, other than the other users' say so, which they may not be truthful about.
On a personal (non-staff-decision-making) level, I found myself questioning the validity of said former user's contributions to the knowledge base due to some fantastically faulty reasoning in an off-topic thread, which was so severe that I couldn't help but take even his apparently informed takes on transportation issues with a grain of salt, since I knew he was apparently viewing the world through a warped lens. I didn't factor this into any moderation duties I performed with regards to this user, however (and another member of the mod staff was who originally brought him up as needing moderation enforcement).
And I'm curious as to how an attack on another participant is defined. Is it a specific criticism of them by name? Are there certain lines or phrases that cannot be used? Are we talking about general criticisms ("h belkins is an idiot") vs. specific criticisms ("h belkins is wrong about the need for an interstate between Martinsville and Roanoke")? One of the posts that got deleted in this thread called me a libertarian. I didn't regard that as an attack. It was an incorrect assertion, but it wasn't an attack in my view.
Can we get around this by lampooning specific posts without mentioning who posted it? "SmokeOnTheWater is a clown for suggesting that I-70 doesn't serve Baltimore" might be impermissible, but "the idea that I-70 doesn't serve Baltimore is buffoonish" is OK?
This is incredibly simple. Presenting arguments against people's ideas is okay ("
h belkins is wrong about the need for an interstate between Martinsville and Roanoke, because..."). Calling someone names ("
h belkins is an idiot", "
SmokeOnTheWater is a clown for suggesting that I-70 doesn't serve Baltimore") is not.
Calling an idea "buffoonish" is on thin ice because the person who posted that idea may take that as you calling
them buffoonish. The better thing to do is to illustrate the facts of the matter in such a way that anyone reading your post would come to the conclusion themselves that the idea is buffoonish.
