In the last few weeks, it occurred to me that the respect took a serious drop on this board. We witnessed people swearing, swearing at others, calling each other “fu**tard”, “fu**head”, “assholes”, etc, FOR ABSOLUTELY NO VALUABLE REASON.
I could quote a lot of posts here, but my goal is not to point out some individuals as “disrespectful ASC users”. Just let me remind you that we stand here as a community of people sharing a common interest: Airsoft. You have to understand that a community is composed of DIFFERENT individuals having DIFFERENT opinions. So if you found that somebody made a bad joke, you don’t have to call him an asshole for doing so. If you really feel in your heart that telling the guy’s joke lacked of humour will bring some positive to the thread, go on. But do it politely.
The Off-Topic section is particularly subject to those useless flames. If you aren’t interested by a thread’s subject, DON’T READ IT. Nobody cares that you don’t care. Don’t burst in and say how much the guy who started the thread is “gay”, or idiot, or girlish or whatever you think he is. The majority of the ASC members are mature enough to tell by themselves if the thread is worth to be read. You don’t care? FINE, don’t lose any more time by posting pointless hate stuff. You still want to say it? Again, do it politely.
Now, I have to say, I don’t really mind the swearing. It just diminishes the credibility of the “swearer”. If somebody wants to impair its own image, I have no problem with that. But when the swearing is directed to another ASC member, this is totally unacceptable. I’d like to quote HonestJohn (in the rules of this Forum).
Quote:
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Originally Posted by HonestJohn
3. Avoid personal attacks.
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Sadly, this rule isn’t really applied. And we can’t blame the Moderators for that. I guess that they are quite busy. Every member here has the duty (this sounds like Bush’s speech) to let know the disrespectful members that we don’t agree with their behaviour. I shut up too many times on this matter. I posted my opinion about respect two times and it sort of closed the debate.
For the newbies issue: I know these days are filled with noob questions, non-reading posting newbies. Yes, this is irritating. But it doesn’t excuses in any way the disrespect some people shown here. I know some newbies insisted too much, haven’t listened after two pages of posts telling them to read the FAQs. In those cases, the Moderators are there to use the “ban button”. I don’t know if it’s possible to ban for a week, just to give the time to the guy to read and stop posting and wasting our time. But in most cases, the simple “read the FAQs please” is sufficient. Maybe a good solution would be to send an automatically generated PM to the newly registered member that would point him to the FAQs and would tell him that if he posts a question already answered, he’d get banned for a certain amount of time, just to give him the time to read a bit.
I’m just throwing ideas here. But until we find something, it would be nice from all of us if we could make some effort to respect each other. Sometimes you’ve had a bad day and the “flame switch" is easier to turn on, but think a bit: others didn’t ask to suffer from your bad day. BREATHE.
I know the “respect each other” speech is not very popular, as some people will find this kiddy I guess. But I sincerely hope that I am not the only one thinking that way.
Have any thoughts about this? Feel free to post what you think. Any other “newbie solution” would be nice, since I have little knowledge about Forum Administration, if we could find something intelligent to do about that, it would be great.
Thanks a lot for having read this. Wish it will change some things.
Kymoz