General Discussion Of Moderation Procedures (aka 'The Whine List')

You guys know we're talking about Moose, right? A wise man once said "the reign (of Moose) falls on the just and unjust alike." Arach is just lucky that his suspension came with a stated reason.

That seems like a potential avenue for an SQL injection attack via arguments to white-listed tags. Or do you have a white list of permissible SQL commands, too?

That's not "double-spaced." Double-spaced means "double spacing between lines of text", and the reason that its specified in the MLA Guide (and generally by anyone else accepting manuscripts) is to provide enough space to make proofreading marks. Manuscripts, after all, are completely reset for printing so there would be no reason to expect submitting authors to make concessions to the format of the finished material. Anything you're asking a submitting author to do is for the benefit of proofreaders and editors.No style guide since the age of typewriters has specified "period space space capital" formatting, because modern computers kern text - that is, they adjust the space between letters to compensate for the relative visual width of letters. In the age of typewriters "period space space capital" formatting was preferred because the text was monospaced and unkerned, so there was less visual density of text and therefore less apparent space between sentences."The Mac is not a Typewriter" is, of course, best-selling author and editor Robin Williams's cri de coeur against obsolete style guides misapplied to computers, and he spends most of it railing against "period space space capital" formatting, and he's absolutely right - unless you're reading this on your old IBM Selectric, somehow, you shouldn't be doing it under any circumstances.

Underscore for safety's sake.

Yes, you're quite right. There's a lot of posters that I simply can't help but give short shrift to because of how they construct messages - either too many short single-line sentences, each with their own ideas that don't flow together; or monolithic blocks of text with no room for breath. My brain simply says "ugh, nothing here is going to be worth the work" and I skip over.But ultimately I think it's more about the flow of ideas than strict formatting rules. But making an effort to mimic established rules of style - quote only relevant text, organized in paragraphs between two and 5 sentences and clearly delimited, avoid overuse of jargon, use variety in sentence structure - adhering to these won't make your ideas any better, but the effort to do so might, by accident, get you to express your ideas more clearly and flow between them more smoothly.

Sure.Like, I don't ask because I think you haven't taken measures, I ask because I'm curious, and somewhat of a (poor) programmer myself. And I guess I could try to find out by trying these hacks myself but if any of them worked I'd have destroyed EvC Forum. (That, of course, overestimates my hacking abilities to a significant extent.)Of course, maybe you don't want to openly discuss the nuts and bolts of site security? Maybe I'll just let it go.

HTML strips out extra whitespace, so here it doesn't matter. In any other context where you're producing printed material on a computer, you shouldn't be.Don't misapply obsolete styles.

UR DOIN IT RONG

Right, but that's a monospaced font, which is exactly when you should do it.Unless Jon is writing papers in Courier, though, he shouldn't use two spaces after periods.

It's like the people who insist that you can't end a sentence with a preposition, or split an infinitive verb. They heard a rule, but they don't understand the rule, so they don't understand its context or scope.

And you're filtering everything? Username and password fields?

I wonder if Purpledawn could provide examples of this: To my knowledge I've not ever been censured, suspended, or even warned about Rule 8 violations, though many times have I attempted to bring such violations to the attention of the moderators. I've certainly been accused of such violations but almost always by individuals who are themselves misrepresenting my position (Holmes/Silent H, for instance.)Where people have genuinely contributed to misunderstanding by having misspoke, I've not ever held them to their misstated positions. Rrhain drops his negative modifiers, for instance, and I've not ever held that against him. It would be stupid to; you can almost always tell from the context when someone's done that.

Politely, no. This is not the subject on which I want to pop my Great Debate cherry.

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You have a hard-on for the moderation style on this forum, don't you? They didn't react the way you think they should. You see the near unanimity of the moderators' opinions against you as some kind of conspiracy. That's fine. You are entitled to your opinion.

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I'm not looking forward to your inevitable suspension, AZPaul, but you need to understand that's the consequence for respectfully, constructively criticizing moderator actions.

Don't you know how it works around here?Moose did it; therefore, by definition, it was the right thing to do.