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If people need a space to grieve, a message board may or may not be a good place to do that, depending on how individual relationships are structured and what the culture of the board is.
Very true. If the thread had been set up for the purpose of grieving, that would be a very different thing, and there is certainly a space for that.
I thought that the specific argument about gun control between Boboss and Kirk Ultra was getting out of hand, and threatening threadrot not particularly because of the gun control issue but because it was turning into flaming, and flaming rots threads. This is a failing of the conversation rather than the topic. Should they have exercised more decorum because of the subject matter? Perhaps so, and perhaps so should Hieronymus, and in both cases one's own expectations might colour one's reactions. However, the idea of a "decorum policy" strikes me as decidedly tricky to conceive of or enforce. If a thread is to be intended purely for people to mourn, in a decorous fashion by whatever standard of decorum we are applying here, then it can be flagged as such in the topic summary. In this case, a degree of confusion was introduced by the change of summaries, which Flowers did to reflect how the thread had actually developed, but the first summary itself did not specify that the topic needed to be approached in a particular way, apart from the usual requirements of topicality and Barbetiquette. |
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