[4 Jaw Chuck]

The Golden Rule:


It has come to the attention of the moderating staff here at HR.com that a minor portion of the membership have been violating the membership agreement. Specifically we are referring to the portion of the agreement that refers to personal conduct on the board. This is a relatively grey area of the agreement you signed when you joined this forum and as such is rarely strictly enforced since it is universally regarded as a common sense rule that we assume you were taught as a child.

What am I referring to?

The Golden Rule, treat others as you would have them treat you. Pretty simple really but we are seeing an increase in members breaking the Golden Rule on a regular basis, we expect you as an adult member of this forum to remember this in your postings and not to incite or respond to other members with cruel intentions or words designed to provoke an escalating response.

We can all agree to disagree without inciteful language or name calling, otherwise the moderating staff will simply delete your comments and suspend your privileges for a period of time that we vote is appropriate. If that sounds like a "spanking and being sent to the corner" to contemplate your actions...it is. As your Mom/Dad might have said...we don't like doing it anymore than you like it.

The moderating staff all agree this is not a widespread problem, but it is a problem for some. We have a list of repeat offenders in a special thread in the moderating forum of those that may require special treatment because of their behavior. Needless to say it is as distasteful to us as it sounds, none of us signed up to become babysitters on the internet. We have not acted to date except in exceptional cases but as of today that is changing, this rule applies to your PM's to other members as well...we can't read what you say in your PM's to each other but if you are acting in the background and breaking the "Golden Rule" privately and the receiver complains to us about your actions we will act immediately and decisively.

If you are a bully in public or private on this board you will be suspended, perhaps permanently... I think everyone can agree no one deserves to be harassed on this forum...EVER! You are not anonymous on the web in spite of what you may have read.

My recommendation to all new and existing members is to look at each thread and respond to the OP (original poster) and limit your responses to them taking the golden rule into account. Arguing or name calling to other posters (or the OP!) in that thread means your doing it wrong...very wrong. Let the OP make the decision if your information is worth following or not, you have no right to decide if someones elses information is wrong or not and certainly do not have the right to make an issue with someone else postings in that thread...you might both be wrong. There are plenty of ways to correct a previous posters possible inconsistencies or inaccuracy's without starting a flame war. Proofread your posts prior to hitting that "Submit new post" tab, your words can be taken out of context if you don't.

In particular please treat newer members with respect, they are often young and impressionable and may have come from another forum where the rules are different and simply do not know what is acceptable here, in that case let us do our job and we will moderate as seen fit. We appreciate those who identify threads that do not fit into the forum etiquette such as threads that are obvious advertisements etc...but sending us notifications when a thread is "dumb" or if the poster appears to be spelling/language challenged...is not necessary. We get enough e-mail to choke a large farm animal everyday and you letting us know if a member has spelling issues is none of your concern.


Please act as if your Mom would be reading what you write, maybe she is...remember we really hate being your MOM!

Thanks for listening, your contributions to this forum are extremely valuable and timeless...you don't want your children to be reading how poorly you treated other people here...rather we would prefer them to look back and say;

"Wow he/she really knew their stuff, being able to go back in time and see what he/she was saying back then is great! Whats an internal combustion engine?"

[35terraplane]

Originally Posted by 4 Jaw Chuck

The Golden Rule:


It has come to the attention of the moderating staff here at HR.com that a minor portion of the membership have been violating the membership agreement. Specifically we are referring to the portion of the agreement that refers to personal conduct on the board. This is a relatively grey area of the agreement you signed when you joined this forum and as such is rarely strictly enforced since it is universally regarded as a common sense rule that we assume you were taught as a child.

What am I referring to?

The Golden Rule, treat others as you would have them treat you. Pretty simple really but we are seeing an increase in members breaking the Golden Rule on a regular basis, we expect you as an adult member of this forum to remember this in your postings and not to incite or respond to other members with cruel intentions or words designed to provoke an escalating response.

We can all agree to disagree without inciteful language or name calling, otherwise the moderating staff will simply delete your comments and suspend your privileges for a period of time that we vote is appropriate. If that sounds like a "spanking and being sent to the corner" to contemplate your actions...it is. As your Mom/Dad might have said...we don't like doing it anymore than you like it.

The moderating staff all agree this is not a widespread problem, but it is a problem for some. We have a list of repeat offenders in a special thread in the moderating forum of those that may require special treatment because of their behavior. Needless to say it is as distasteful to us as it sounds, none of us signed up to become babysitters on the internet. We have not acted to date except in exceptional cases but as of today that is changing, this rule applies to your PM's to other members as well...we can't read what you say in your PM's to each other but if you are acting in the background and breaking the "Golden Rule" privately and the receiver complains to us about your actions we will act immediately and decisively.

If you are a bully in public or private on this board you will be suspended, perhaps permanently... I think everyone can agree no one deserves to be harassed on this forum...EVER! You are not anonymous on the web in spite of what you may have read.

My recommendation to all new and existing members is to look at each thread and respond to the OP (original poster) and limit your responses to them taking the golden rule into account. Arguing or name calling to other posters (or the OP!) in that thread means your doing it wrong...very wrong. Let the OP make the decision if your information is worth following or not, you have no right to decide if someones elses information is wrong or not and certainly do not have the right to make an issue with someone else postings in that thread...you might both be wrong. There are plenty of ways to correct a previous posters possible inconsistencies or inaccuracy's without starting a flame war. Proofread your posts prior to hitting that "Submit new post" tab, your words can be taken out of context if you don't.

In particular please treat newer members with respect, they are often young and impressionable and may have come from another forum where the rules are different and simply do not know what is acceptable here, in that case let us do our job and we will moderate as seen fit. We appreciate those who identify threads that do not fit into the forum etiquette such as threads that are obvious advertisements etc...but sending us notifications when a thread is "dumb" or if the poster appears to be spelling/language challenged...is not necessary. We get enough e-mail to choke a large farm animal everyday and you letting us know if a member has spelling issues is none of your concern.


Please act as if your Mom would be reading what you write, maybe she is...remember we really hate being your MOM!

Thanks for listening, your contributions to this forum are extremely valuable and timeless...you don't want your children to be reading how poorly you treated other people here...rather we would prefer them to look back and say;

"Wow he/she really knew their stuff, being able to go back in time and see what he/she was saying back then is great! Whats an internal combustion engine?"

4 Jaw; I don't know if you want us to respond to this thread or not. I will admit, at times I may have bent or broken the Golden Rule, but then some threads can get heated as you well know, being on the board as long as you have. I have had some disagreements with people at times and said things maybe I should not have, but 99.9% of those people I have gone back and posted too, or they have posted me. I know that does not make it right, but most of us older (age) know life is too short to hold a grudge.

But when a new person comes on here, it's like they want to stir the pot , get the old guys mad. When every poster says get rid of the guy, sometimes it goes on too long before he's gone.

Last you don't want us to let you know when a spammer comes on, or we think it's a spammer. Or just a trouble maker, we have all seen threads go on and not dumped, now if you guys don't want us to let you know they could go on longer. Or did I read that wrong.

You guys (Mods) do a great job, No one has ever gotten on me.( I'm no angel I know, my wife tells me all the time.) You do a great job. I for one will watch myself more closely, I don't feel guilty about anything just trying to help. Thanks for the good work.

Bob

[4 Jaw Chuck]

No worries, everyone has a bad day....we know that. This post wasn't created to let everyone know we have a gun pointed at the board 24/7 ready to ban anyone who has an altercation with another member.

Rather it is meant as a notice to the entire membership that it has become a problem and we have to do something about it. I am no saint myself and if you read almost 10 years of my posts you will see that, did I get in trouble for those instances...yep sure did. We dont expect Mother Theressa as most of us are grownups and have been around long enough to know better, but a small portion of the membership see's this site as a place to blow off steam at anyone who might be less knowledgeable or experienced thinking they are anonymous sitting behind their computer...guess what your not.

Anyone thats been here long enough knows the same threads show up day after day, I remember once there were 6 threads in this forum all asking the same 400SBC question regarding possible horsepower. This is one reason why we created the beginners forum and added moderators to handle the workload to merge threads, this website is one gigantic database of knowledge and we take great strides to try and make that data relevant for future generations.

This is a completely different tact/direction than most websites take towards the information posted on their forums, on most websites the forums are lightly moderated and rarely is the information posted there considered the gold. We wont be weeding out the chaff, its here for all eternity...hence why we want to keep it civil and cordial but we consider the information posted here invaluable.

We want the membership to continue telling us about spammers and people intentionally breaking the agreement rules but if a certain member has spelling issues or has no idea what he is talking about in a thread...there is little we can do to change that behaviour. That is simply life and we have to live with it, we have all worked with that one guy who was incomprehensible at some point in our life.

If you have never heard from the moderating staff before and have never had issues with another member that you couldn't resolve between yourselves...you can assume your doing it right. This thread was primarily sent out to serve notice to that extremely small minority who come here to start trouble, they know who they are. Most of all we want to weed out those who are "trolling" using the PM feature in private conversations to other members, this would be like the bully at school whispering in your ear during class that "your dead after school". It simply won't be tolerated and you will banned if this is the type of member you are, this type of behaviour is not tolerated anywhere in todays society and we won't be party to any meetings out in the school yard or held accoutable for the actions taken there.

Let there be no mistake, this type of behaviour is the most serious of them all...we won't be sitting back and giving you boxing gloves to solve it here on the forum...we will act immediately to stop the problem member(s) once we know about it. We have all read the news and seen what can happen when this type of behaviour is left unchecked, it will not happen here as long as we moderators are part of the equation.

We have discussed putting out a list of most frequently "ignored" members as a sort of gauge for the membership but at this point we want to serve the notice first to see if the behaviour improves or changes for this small minority. We may still do that in the future but this is a first step to making this a better place.

Its a small sandbox guys and we can all play nice together...lots of sand to go around. Watch out for cat poop, if you see some let us know and we will flick it out...of course you can use my shovel...lets join our cities and make a huge one we can all drive on before Godzilla comes and destroys it.

Rawrrrrrrr!

P.S. If that big bully kid from down the block comes here and tries to ruin our fun let me know, I have a really big shovel for him.