Please use this thread for alerting admins to moderation issues and for discussion or complaints arising from particular decisions.
The Skeptical Zone
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
Please use this thread for alerting admins to moderation issues and for discussion or complaints arising from particular decisions.
At least now we know!
Thanks to Alan for the clarification!
You are so lucky _hotshoe isn’t still here.
phoodoo,
Perhaps next time we can ask Alan to feature such posts. He can stick it at the top, so to speak.
Mung,
I miss hotshoe_! 🙁
Mung,
I was never asked to give my gender when I signed up here, so I am not sure how Alan knows.
He (she?) really is mysterious.
phoodoo,
It’s my intuition!
I thought it was because the image was so big in relation to the rest of the post.
Rumraket should have used a smaller photo.
On the bright side, we still have keiths!
Mung,
Be honest. Is the diagram intrinsically offensive to you? Have you never needed advice on how to insert a suppository? It’s a popular way of administering drugs in France.
For what little it’s worth, it wasn’t offensive to me but it was over the top. More graphic (though not porno-graphic) than necessary to make the point.
Still, I saved the image for future use.
Perhaps he just is rather then has.
No. But that’s hardly the point. As someone who was at one time addicted to pornography it certainly wasn’t because I found it intrinsically offensive.
I read the post and moved on. I even joked about it with newton. It wasn’t until posts started moving to Guano that it became noteworthy.
Mung channeling keiths: It was neither inappropriate to the thread nor insulting.
Damned if you do and damned if you don’t Alan. 🙂
Alan did us all a favor and enshrined it in Guano where we can all just link to it from now on. And no fear of being banned for it!
It is apparently not relevant.
The way I heard it Joe never posted an image. But I bet keiths has a link to it. If you ask him nicely.
Anything educational would be a pleasant change
Alan Fox,
I was traveling today. It seems that I missed all the fun.
Mung:
Close, but not quite.
Whether it was “inappropriate to the thread”, whatever that means, is not for the moderators to say. And it definitely wasn’t insulting. Hostile, yes, but not insulting.
It didn’t violate the rules and should not have been guanoed.
More on this later.
Of course it violated the rules. That’s the whole point. if what Joe did violated the rules, to the point that he was actually banned, then of course Rumraket violated the rules. But actually Alan doesn’t care about that. Alan wants to be an advocate. An apologist for all things atheist. So he would never in a million years ban Rumraket. He would make up any excuse he could not to do so.
“Well, it didn’t offend me, so its not porn, see?” “It was educational. Some people need suppositories….,” Alan can say anything. Because he is Alan. he has no integrity. No desire to be fair and honest. He is a hack. That is not going to change.
But hey, its good news for the site, right? Because now we know what isn’t porn. Super!
Or maybe I am wrong, maybe Alan just had a painful hemorrhoid that has been bothering him, and that affected his judgement. Yes, that could be it! Is it like this?
[copyright-infringing image deleted by Alan Fox]
Phoodoo figures that if he’s aroused by hemorrhoids, everyone else must be too.
phoodoo,
The comment was guanoed not for the image (which was illustrative and graphic, not pornographic) but for the message implied “stick your opinion up your arse” which is insulting and against the rules. The illustrative diagram has its uses as noted above but I don’t think its appearance in the thread made much sense otherwise, and was thus inappropriate though this is not in itself a criterion for a move to guano. If the image was intended to illustrate a point, rather than to be an admittedly witty insult, I wouldn’t have moved the comment.
Repeated posting of inappropriate images might stray into the realm of spamming (not to mention bandwidth) so I hope for a little restraint.
Alan and Neil,
Copyright law is something to take seriously. The image that phoodoo posted is itself telling you that he should not have posted it.
I am not a lawyer, but I know that low-resolution thumbnails pass muster at Wikipedia. To create a low-res thumbnail, just make the display of an image small on your screen, and then do a screen grab (selecting the region containing the image). As an example, I’ve attached something that I’ll be using in an opening post, bimeby. My objective is to convey the complexity of what’s on the page, while making the text illegible.
Alan Fox,
The problem is not just the image. IIRC, Lizzie said something about malware at porn sites.
Tom English,
Thanks for pointing that out, Tom. I should have thought about copyright. Simplest just to delete it.
Tom English,
Sure. So far, such stuff doesn’t get through our filters.
You mooing UDder, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.
I’d like very much to see your comparison of Alan Fox to Barry Arrington.
What is inappropriate?
Are you making up new rules again, to justify your double standards?
Finally!!! THank yOU TOM!!!
Myself, and I’m quite positive the whole community of ID, has been looking forward to your long-time promised OP on the quantum mechanics blow to the ID claims…
I have to admit, that if ever there was a reason for me to return to TSZ, at least temporarily, your OP on quantum mechanics would be the reason to do it…
I’m not sure whether you are aware, but if Discovery Institute knew you were doing the long overdue OP on QM, they would be packing their bags yesterday… They’ve probably been aware that you’ve been on the mission not only to single-handedly take down Dembski, Evert and the third guy, but also ID movement world-wide…
I’m shivering with fear already 😉
Alan:
It is hostile, but not insulting. It did not violate the rules and should not have been guanoed.
It was inappropriate to the thread and hostile.
Alan would not have banned Joe. So no double standard there!
I fully support the guano’ing of my comment. I knowingly posted it expecting it to be guano’able material. That phoodoo is tied up in knots about it just makes it all the more delightful. I’ve been smiling all day. To each his own I guess 🙂
Rumraket,
Why, do you think off topic comments should be guanoed?
Aww look at him go.
phoodoo has been well aware for quite some time that the moderation here is biased.
There’s nothing special about your post in that regard.
And now comes Rumraket to brag about being able to post porn and get away with it.
How low will he go?
Rectum? Huh?
Y’all get an F in human anatomy.
</pedant mode>
DNA “That’s not my finger either” Jock
It would be J-Mac’s Annual Farewell Tour.
After you get nominated for Nobel Prize for the unification of general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, I will gladly leave TSZ at peace… 😉
I didn’t bother saying goodbye to J-Mac, because I figured his OP was just another temporary flounce.
Suspicion confirmed.
A recap of this latest moderation kerfuffle:
Rumraket posted a comment that said, in effect, to a deserving target: “That’s just an opinion. You can shove it up your ass.”
The grownups took it in stride. They read the comment, had a laugh, and moved on. That should have been the end of it.
Not for Alan and phoodoo, who had an attack of the vapors and decided that Something Must Be Done About It.
Phoodoo hysterically called for Rumraket to be banned, on the idiotic premise that what Rumraket posted was porn.
Alan guanoed the comment, despite the fact it didn’t violate any rules, and despite the fact that it would have been far wiser to leave it alone.
That fuckup alone wasn’t enough for Alan, who then guanoed still more non-rule-violating comments based on his made-up “continuity rule”.
Having acted impulsively, he then tried to rationalize his behavior in retrospect:
Whether it was “inappropriate to the thread” is not for the moderators to decide, and the comment was not “insulting to a member”. Hostile (and funny), yes. Insulting, no. It should not have been guanoed.
When phoodoo asked if a similar graphic was permissible, Alan responded:
WTF does that even mean, and why should the gender of TSZ members be relevant here?
Later — after realizing how ridiculous and sexist that statement was, and after I’d pointed out that it is not for moderators to decide whether a comment is “appropriate to a thread” — Alan tried to backtrack:
So Alan galumphs into a situation that should have been left alone, fucks up by guanoing a comment that didn’t violate the rules, compounds the fuckup by guanoing more comments for “continuity”, then fumbles around trying to come up with an excuse, in retrospect, for his behavior, making a ridiculous and sexist argument along the way. He sure as hell isn’t going to acknowledge his mistake and fix it, because Alan doesn’t like to admit mistakes, and what Alan wants always takes precedence over the best interests of TSZ.
He could have avoided this entire fiasco by simply exercising a little self-control, reflecting on the actual rules, and leaving Rumraket’s comment in place, where it belonged.
Alan is a walking moderation clusterfuck.
keiths,
Right.
Except every single participant on this site disagrees with your version.
But you seem to like it that way.
phoodoo,
And you know this how, exactly?
You take a survey?
There are plugins for that.
newton,
You agree with his version?
Fixed that fer ya.
This is a lie.
ETA: Silly me. It came from keiths.
phoodoo,
Instead of making claims you can’t support about what “every single participant on this site” thinks, why not simply tell us what you disagree with in my comment, and why?
Do you think that Joe was banned for posting a link to porn, or do you have a made up story for that too?