I think the number of flags speak for themselves here.
When you first started getting flagged, I heard from others on the community letting me know you’ve caused problems on other sites, and advising me to make sure your interactions with other users remained civil. We’ve got a lot of outspoken users here, and people are generally able to disagree without being disagreeable, so I mostly ignored that feedback until you had well over 30 flags.
At that point I messaged you to let you know you need to either control yourself and operate within the guidelines of the site, or you can be the 2nd or 3rd person we’ve banned, ever.
As I mentioned then, people are allowed to be “wrong” here, over and over again. Criticism, even if it’s misguided or in-bad-faith, is tolerated so long as the target is not other community members.
People are allowed to love MQA, hate MQA, ignore MQA, or anywhere in-between, but people on both sides of this issue need to debate it without crossing the line – everyone needs to respond within the guidelines, or flag, or ignore. Those are the only options.
Anyone who routinely lets their anger boil over onto the site, to the point where they are continually getting flagged will get a warning followed by a ban – otherwise the community guidelines are worthless. It’s not that complicated, and it has nothing to do with free speech.
Since our conversation, you’ve received another 10 flags, and as of today nearly 60 posts of yours have had to be deleted. You still haven’t been banned, but you’re still accusing us of banning or silencing people.
I wish I had more time to help moderate this community site, but every second that my team or I spend debating flags is time they’re not supporting customers, and time I’m not shipping new features and improvements to Roon. And it takes time away from our moderators, who I think do an absolutely spectacular job every day holding down the fort and keeping things civil.
If people think our guidelines are being applied unevenly, or that our guidelines should be changed, they should feel to open a thread or message me privately – that’s great feedback and I’d like to know more – I take responsibility for what happens on this site, and it’s entirely possible we need some additional rules related to “grandstanding”. There are ways to propose those changes that don’t involve attacking others or ignoring the guidelines.
Ultimately numbers are numbers, and the rate at which you are accumulating flags and deleted posts is not sustainable for our site if we’re going to get anything done and keep things civil – if I let your infractions slide, I get accused of playing favorites the next time someone goes just a little bit further. The guidelines exist for a reason, hence my initial message to you.
Maybe you have other ideas, but I can only think of two reasons you’ve been flagged so many times, by so many people – either you’re having a tough time controlling yourself when responding to people you disagree with, or you simply don’t care about the guidelines and have no intention of following them.
If it’s the former, I would ask you again – respectfully – to get it together.
If it’s the latter, and you don’t plan to follow the same rules as everyone else, well then I’m running out of options. Across tens of thousands of people, we’ve banned maybe 2 people ever, so I hope everyone reading this is getting a clear picture for how our moderators and staff approach these issues.
I really wish moderation was never needed, and we’re very open to constructive feedback about how we can improve the discussion while ensuring everyone can say their piece and not be attacked.
