FAQ/Guidelines refined

[Jerry Fusselman]

I wonder about this phrase:

enticing/baiting others to violate forum guidelines will not be tolerated here.

It sounds vague to me. It sounds like utter nonsense. Enticing and baiting could be anything. How do you know some one's motives? It is sheer guess work. You seriously cannot know.

Can anyone cite one post on this forum, just one post, where we can deduce that the motives of the poster are to bait or entice others to violate forum guidelines? I would be impressed by the deduction. I expect no one can really do this, and if so, this proves that the quoted passage is not ideal.

Instead of saying that an unprovable motive is banned, I would rather see a statement that denigrating the motives of a person is banned. Let us discuss issues, not motives. Alleging dark motives, I think, is one of the easiest ways to start a flame war. Please just ban questioning of motives.

[Dave Henry]

This sounds great only to have been violated already. The one thing that drives me away from this forum is the frequent use of profanity. I have so little time available to read forums that I am looking for pleasant and informative commentary when I make the time. We all hear profanity or adolescent flaming and behavior in the everyday world, we shouldn't have to read it as well in the cyber world.

Don't bother flaming as I am leaving in the morning for a four-day shoot and won't be able to read it. Sorry.

[Juergen Sattler]

I congratulate the moderators for resisting to put too many strict rules and regulations in place. There is no way to prevent some of the flaming wars and some of them are very informative. It would be much easier for a moderator to come up with a very restrictive set of forum guidelines, than to allow some flexibility, as they have done. The world is not just black OR white- as we all should know:-) Thank you!

[Frank Petronio]

I appreciate the job the mods are doing, but I think it is unrealistic to attempt to regulate human nature, or to expect everybody to act like a saint. And a little tension keeps people interested and returning. So I really don't mind a moderate amount of controversy -- it's only online -- it's not like some radical LF photographer is going to come to my door and splash Pyro on me or bash in my new digital camera.

So I question why waste time tweaking the rules when they end up being subjective anyway? People on the forum can always ignore the evil doers, and on a case by case basis the mods can delete, warn, and ban people and posts.

Afterall the worst case scenario is that some evildoer posts swear words and child porn alongside a camera for sale ad. How long do you think that post would last even on the slowest day?

(Sorry about my use of a swearword back a few, I guess I am warped from too much exposure to diapers...)

[Ralph Barker]

Thanks to everyone for your comments. While we obviously can't please all the people all the time, we try to strike a reasonable middle ground in the guidelines, and "enforce" them with a reasonable degree of flexibility.