Now that's enough!

[Mehmed II]

Mehmed, this sentence is an unneccessary personal attack, and totally superfluous to your argument. I have edited it out. Kindly refrain from framing debate points in terms of "you showed..." "you are..." etc. Just make your points, and the rest of it can figure it out. Thanks!

morble

Ceasar Antonius, you showed that you don't know a thing about muslim empires by your ''greatest empire'' post so I suggest you stop now.

This is the exact insults that username posted to me in the greatest military machine's topic. No one censored that post!

[morble]

Well, that was before my time. When I started as a mod, I did go back through several thread topics and take out all the flames and notified all the transgressors and tried to get the discussions back on track. But this took hours for each separate thread, and the miltary machine topic is 24 :o pages. Have a little mercy; my day is only 24 hours long, same as everyone else.

As for username, I had a prolonged exchange of words with him. I finally told him flat out that, while his posts were in general very intelligent and informative, if he was going to continue to flame in the middle of those posts, then he should take his posts elsewhere. Seen him around lately?

On the one hand, maybe it's not fair that the rules--rather, the enforcement of the rules--changed when I took on modding responsibilities. On the other hand, I am making a very deliberate effort to hold absolutely everyone to the exact same standards from now and all points forward.

Most members read the threads, but don't post on them. As a reader, it is dissonant and annoying to be following an argument, then see it degenerate into another silly flame war. I'm not singling you out, Mehmed. Believe me, even admins get the same PM when I feel they've crossed the line. (I'm gonna have to correct that typo, though. it=>us )

One of my goals is to remove any intimidation factor for new would-be posters. We have a lot of highly intelligent and very well-informed posters. Someone who is possibly not as well-informed is naturally going to be apprehensive about venturing any sort of opinion on the forums, if it seems likely he or she is going to be flamed as their reward. More posters=more points of view=better conversations=we all benefit.

So, from this point forward, I am asking everyone to take a little extra care before they post and make sure their comments cannot be construed as an ad hominem attack. As a rule of thumb for every poster, if your comments are addressed in the second person (You are... You failed... You blind fool... etc), then such are probably not part of a reasoned argument and should not be included in your post.