Why is this thread Locked?

[The Marquis]

I once saw a bunch of my friends breathing in helium through a balloon.

I laughed: He, He, He.

 

[Gustav]

And if SciForums moderation had established a reputation for consistently acting against such behavior, you'd have a point.

But you guys let far more egregious stuff than that go unchecked all the time.

If anyone derailed that thread, it was you. Gustav just tossed off a quick joke - the sort of minor thing that passes without incident all the time even in heavily moderated fora, or in real life. It was your overzealous reaction to such that made the thread about your overzealous reaction. The spectacle of moderators abusing their power to target individuals they bear grudges against simply for tossing off an innocuous jest is far more disruptive to discourse here than anything Gustav did in that thread - which is why that thread immediately became all about your bullshit power trip.

So the upshot is that you've damaged your credibility as a mod, pissed off a bunch of members and likely ensured that you are going to have an even harder time dealing with Gustav in the future. And for what? A few back-room high-fives from the other mods who harbor grudges against him, maybe?



1/4 the injustice is still too much injustice. You are the problem here, not Gustav.



Gustav contributed a reasonably funny joke to that thread, and you jumped down his throat over it. Your warning was totally unjustified, and you are a fool if you imagined that Gustav would respond to such in any other way.

Meanwhile, plenty of people who do nothing more than threadshit all over the place are tolerated indefinitely, without sanction. So spare us your pretenses about interest in "meaning" or "contributions." It is insulting. You're just looking out for your own personal authority. Stick to deleting spam messages and don't try to push members around - it will backfire like this.



The "forum rules" in this sense are enforced in an entirely capricious manner. Various moderators routinely violate them with no visible consequences whatsoever. These rules do not exist, as such. All we have is the empowerment of the whims of moderators like yourself, who display no consistency in that sense and simply invoke the rules as ex post facto pretenses to justify whatever it was they wanted to do. The upshot being that you guys have no credibility when you point to the rules. This is the bed you fools have made for yourselves, and you need to understand that you are not fooling anybody with pretenses to the contrary.



That is because you fucked up, egregiously and visibly. It is time for you to own up to that and attempt to make it right. Neither Gustav nor the rest of us should be the ones paying the price for your incompetence and caprice. Gustav's jest was the kind of thing that you could have easily laughed off, building goodwill in the process. If you can't deal with the odd joke popping up in a thread without reaching for the ban hammer, then you should not be moderating.



And you all must know that such a rule is a craven authoritarian shield, and so has never commanded the slightest respect from anyone with a backbone. If you think that acting like dictators of some banana republic is going to make your jobs easier, or earn you respect, or even just not backfire horribly, then you are fools who richly deserve all of the headaches you are creating for yourselves.

WOOT!!​

its such a bad idea to give two bit punks a modship