Is Doug absolutely incorrect in his reasoning for his disdain for the NRA? I think if we all look at the facts over the period of about 75 years, we will see that he is correct. Does it violate forum rules to post about his disdain? Yes. But that doesn't mean he was wrong in his reasoning, it just means that the administrator doesn't want it talked about on his forum.
But here is one of the points that many appear to be missing:
Each and every one of us agreed to follow the rules of this site in order to be allowed to post here. Following the rules is a condition of that privilege.
When one does not follow those rules, they have broken their promise. I feel certain that Doug had it called to his attention when he broke rules that he had promised to follow. He continued to break those rules... It is possible that he even privately communicated very negative responses to those warnings (which may indeed have been his final downfall).
Some folks
can't learn, some folks
refuse to learn, in either case it becomes a constant load on the time and patience of the folks running the site, and eventually one determines that some folks will
never learn and it is time to cut losses.
In any large forum, the vast majority of folks never cause a problem that needs official notice, and there a few that take more time and effort than all the rest combined.
PaFOA uses a similar method of moderating. Seems very labor intensive to me though.
Not really all that labor intensive because the server handles all the bookkeeping and tallying, and responds automatically.
Instead of each "incident" being handled individually and more-or-less in a vacuum, similar incidents are handled the same way and don't depend on emotions (how angry something makes the moderator). Makes for much more even-handed moderation.
________
One further thing. A single person CAN NOT read all the posts made here every day. It's just not possible.
The site staff
must depend on the members of the site to call attention to problems by flagging problem posts.
Even if there were ten times as much staff, they would still have to depend on the members.
On my big site I have 24 moderators, 8 supermoderators, 2 assistant admins, and myself keeping track of things. (Plus 10 technical staff keeping the hamsters fed.)
We still average about a dozen flagged posts a day and absolutely depend on them to do our jobs.
Flagging a post is not being a snitch, it is simply letting those doing their best at running the site know that there may be something they need to look at. A flag by a member gets attention much faster than just hoping that a moderator will read the post sometime...
(I'm going to crawl back into my hole now. I've said enough about this.)