I really hate to sound like I'm brown-nosing here (even thought I totally am, obviously), but where is this disagreement and grumbling about placating whiners coming from? This is Toady we're talking about. Aside from spambots and alts, I can't name a dozen people that he's outright banned in the two years and more that I've been paying attention. And most times it's happened, if people raise a fuss about it, or even about a mute, he usually has a laundry list of reasons ready, including links to specific posts.
So maybe what Dasleah was doing wasn't terribad, or even the worst by his own record. I'm willing to give Toady the benefit of the doubt; maybe he thought it was the last straw or didn't want to let it get bigger like it often did. I only saw this mystery thread at it's beginning, where he was outright expecting to be muted, like some kind of martyr. When you outright say that you're doing something that you expect will get you punished, what other reason does any moderator need?
And I'm not just talking out of my ass here, either. We've experienced exactly the same thing in the bay12games IRC channel -we had to make the rules a lot less implied (basically before our rule was basically 'be chill' as well), and we had to take on more ops to deal with the growing size of the community. And we get a lot less of the flood of fans than the forums do.
I also don't want to sound like I'm arguing with you, just commenting, but high-activity isn't exactly new either. During the flame-out heyday of Various Nonsense, he came up with a guideline in the first place because he thought he was spending too much time doing moderator stuff. Even then, he said it wasn't really a time issue, he was just sick of looking at things. I know he mentioned it in a couple emails, and I swear there's posts around to the same effect, but they're probably buried in VN now regardless.
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Topic: Things that made you sad today thread. (Read 9787892 times)