Thanks for raising the question.
I don’t believe I’ve seen his ‘behavior in this thread’ in ‘almost every thread’. Perhaps a significant portion of his problematic posts occur in the political forum, I choose to not swim in that swamp. If that’s the case, a restriction from the poli board may be a more appropriate solution. This thread is somewhat unique, since we have allowed it to exist in the open forum, despite the fact that the subject matter has been politicized in this country, since it has had such a large impact on everybody. That decision could also be revisited as a potential solution, but I personally still think this thread belongs in the open forum.
Your last sentence I find to be disingenuous. Obviously some posters are going to object to comments made by other posters; that situation has existed since the first few posts were made on this (or any other) message board. There are various ways to deal with that situation, including doing nothing, posting comments on the open board to discourage problematic posts, sending private messages to those involved, and threatening individual members with temporary or permanent bans if their behavior continues to cause problems.
This is the third time I’ve seen a moderator caution a poster inside a thread about a potential ban in the last couple of weeks. The other two were in football threads regarding fans of other teams, and I thought those threats were not warranted. I didn’t make comments in those threads, partly because I didn’t see them right away, but I probably should have. I believe we need to be mindful about how we deal with outside fans, and for those who have shown over time that they can post without causing problems very often, we should allow them more leeway.
Back to the question about skipping the forum entirely. We have had some posters make comments that opinions differing from those of the majority are not shown enough tolerance on this board. We moderators need to walk a fine line: I believe that a principal tenet of BP is to allow posters to be responsible for their own content: we are reluctant to edit and/or delete comments made by those on the board. There are exceptions, of course, we will remove swearing in the recruiting forum, we will delete nudity that crosses the line from the open forums, etc. But it’s possible that more posters have reduced their presence on BP due to their own comments being criticized or mocked than the number of posters who have done so because they don’t like the ‘out there’ content of some other posters.
I am also not trying to take any decision about potentially banning somebody out of another moderator’s hands, I’m not the final arbiter of anything. I know that AKAK has more history with Taos than what I’m aware of. But my point is that if we are going to take action against someone, it should be done on a post that warrants action to be taken. Because when we react strongly to an individual post that by itself appears to be relatively harmless, it can appear to casual readers/posters that there is a heavy-handed moderator presence on the board, and that could deter them from future participation on BP.
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