Dies to Removal

Several staff members still feel that there's significant bad blood between you and the staff, especially given that DTR has smilies for mocking iridium members. There have also been several instances of iridium members' personal information being made public on/through DTR. What are your thoughts on that situation? How would you suggest that we proceed with moving past the current antagonistic atmosphere we seem to have, burying the hatchets & moving forward from where we're at now?

I actually only wanted the new mods to read the story of how people got mad over backwards Morse code Spanish in the form of smileys.

I truly think the only way to bury the hatchet and achieve world peace is if some of us including and maybe especially myself are publicly executed

While I can line-by-line your posts, I can tell you from experience how that plays out. It's an exhaustive process from all sides and only very rarely achieves a shared understanding on a reasonable time scale. More amusingly, it's the more "robotic" way of approaching it. Instead of instilling the human search for understanding and the true meaning behind your words, I'd be addressing them point by point. Input would directly equal output.

Instead I am, as a human, searching for the meaning behind your posts and then to understand and resynthesize to allow me to address the thrust of your points, rather than the minutia. Now, let's turn that back on its head. Are you attempting to do the same to me? No. Instead you see that input does not directly equal output and you're rejecting it on its face. While the irony is amusing to me, the pedantry is not.

Moving back to the issue at hand, I think you need to step back and ask yourself "what is harm?". The "true" harm that can be wrought on a web forum is malicious disclosure (doxxing), fraud (ripping), and psychological abuse (flaming). These are not the only concerns of moderators. We instead look at purpose. Why are we here? We are here to discuss Magic. In the Rumour Mill we look ahead. In Legacy, we discuss Magic's greatest constructed format. All of these have purpose. And in most, mild socialization does not run counter to purpose, instead it may even help foster a collaborative spirit at times. Indeed, this has led to Community Threads propagating out of the Cube forum and into most other forums. But Rulings is different. It has a very different purpose - that of a resource, both concise and searchable, and not of a medium of discussion. I've outlined all of that in preceding posts.

I understand that you do not agree with the rules of the Rulings forum. I agree with you that rules should make sense. Indeed, we've significantly loosened and slimmed the rules since 2011. But your lack of understanding for the purpose of the rules in Rulings does not make them not exist. And your hostile disregard for them has caused you to disrupt the purpose of the forum as described above.

If you want my personal opinion, read this post. As much as I am speaking for the staff here, the words here are my own and I write what I mean. If you were hoping for an automaton blindly following the rules, you will find yourself disappointed. I was an admin here for over two years. I literally wrote many of the rules or crafted or rethought our enforcement of them (both at admin and global). When I disagree with you, it is not an opinion borne of ignorance. Nor is it a blind veneration of a vestigial codex. No, it is what I understand from having literally run the site and from what I understand from being a user and local mod after stepping down. When I engage with you, I try to do so in plain speech. My words may be eccentric, but I'm not looking to turn this into a debate class. I am engaging with the crux of your arguments with as much brevity as I can muster so as to improve the likelihood of us reaching a common understanding.

The other guy's sensitivity was protected?