[s-cars] Question of the Day ..

[dooksniffer at comcast.net]

You are spineless.  Please do not fill my inbox with ranting like that and then remove yourself from response.  Your email to Pizzo was insulting and should have been directed to the source not the list, especially if you want to arbitrarily  quote what he (Pizzo) said.  And, please follow your own rules and "trim" responses.  .  

Not sure about the Ellen comment- but maybe you should take a looky loo at yourself.

By all means, ban me for a week at your leisure

Ron Whiton
(Da Dook)
-------------- Original message -------------- 

> > Is Joe Pizzo actually banned from the list. 
> > Can someone clarify this for us ? 
> 
> For one week, yes. 
> 
> Joe didn't share that, because he sent me an abusive, threatening 
> email before I could finish an email to him. It's only the second 
> time I've been physically threatened by a lister in ten years of 
> being on the list (the first person was banned for life, though that 
> was because he was harassing other list members as well). Despite 
> the threats, I'm still sticking to just one week- and I've also 
> decided not to share the email he sent, unlike the ones from the 
> first person (my usual policy is that if you get to the level of 
> making threats, I stop talking to you entirely, and you'll find your 
> email on the web for friends, family, and potential/current employers 
> to find, along with the email of mine that you were responding to). 
> 
> Joe is one of a very small minority of individuals to have ever 
> been banned, temporarily or not. It is extremely rare. In each 
> case, its an individual who flagrantly violated the "rules of the 
> house" and/or needed to understand that they are GUESTS and we are 
> their HOSTS. They're often individuals who behave like they're "top 
> dog", interfering with the operation of the site. In most cases it 
> has been for only a week or so, to demonstrate the point and get the 
> person to cool down. 
> 
> In Joe's case, he decided to pick a fight with a site admin (me) 
> about site policy (car stuff is another matter entirely- I'll happily 
> admit I'm often wrong there). When I searched my email for his name, 
> I came up with several other emails where he had responded to my 
> posting on administrative topics, and it was much of the same "I've 
> got a chip on my shoulder" BS. This was not an isolated incident. 
> 
> If I send you an email about site policy along with a nice 
> explanation of why we do things that way, and your response it to 
> turn around and insult me- you're challenging me, picking a fight. 
> Having demonstrated to me that words will accomplish nothing with 
> you, you won't get a fight- you'll get banned. I'd challenge you to 
> find any other forum where arguing with the administrators won't get 
> you bounced. You treat all listers with respect, and as in the real 
> world, you treat those whose efforts you benefit from, with a little 
> more respect. You don't have to like us, or fawn over us, or 
> anything like that. Just don't be a jerk, especially when we have 
> the unpleasant task of reminding someone, and the rest of the list, 
> of the rules. 
> 
> As I explained in my original message to Joe, which you all 
> received as well, we have a few rules- they're simple, designed in 
> the best interests of the community, and based off experience running 
> mailing lists for quite some time, with a lot of small but important 
> reasons behind each of them. They apply to every list on this site, 
> though the s-car list has historically received some leeway on the 
> "for sale" emails. At the time, the s-car list needed a home badly, 
> allowed that sort of thing, and we wanted to be good hosts. Over the 
> years I've occasionally reminded s-car listers of the site rules in 
> hopes that they'd take the hint, and/or that the other lists were not 
> the same. 
> 
> The issue came about primarily because Taka CC'd the quattro list, 
> where there is no such leeway. I didn't even respond to him, because 
> someone on the quattro list did a good job of explaining why they 
> thought I had spoken up- and the issue was pretty much over. It 
> persisted on the s-car list, as almost any administrative issue seems 
> to, because someone's got to wave their willy, have the last word, 
> and make the people who run the place out to be ogres or nazis. 
> 
> The rules we ask everyone to follow are simple, few, and common on 
> virtually any mailing list, newsgroup, or web board of appreciable size: 
> 
> -You're not allowed to spam the lists. Like every other forum out 
> there, we have a place for for-sale stuff, and you're expected to use 
> it. When listers said they wanted somewhere to sell stuff, the 
> marketplace software was hand-coded for us by Mark Chang. When 
> listers said items for sale there didn't get enough attention, 
> someone came up with the idea of the notification list. 
> 
> -You're asked to make your posts legible mostly for your own 
> interests (so you don't look like an idiot in front of a lot of 
> people, and so people feel more inclined to answer your post), and 
> trim your replies, in our interests and that of your fellow list 
> members; not everyone has DSL or cable internet access. Some people 
> do actually still pay per-byte, though they are a minority. Many of 
> you use webmail accounts with limited storage space, though gmail has 
> made this less of an issue. It also slows down Google's indexing of 
> our site, which everyone complains about. Lastly, with the advent of 
> DNS blacklists that block DSL/cable IP addresses (where a large 
> amount of spam comes from), it is not as simple as "throw Audifans on 
> a home internet connection"- large numbers of you simply wouldn't get 
> the email. Business-class DSL costing well over a hundred dollars a 
> month in the capacity we need (we need a lot of outgoing bandwidth, 
> not much incoming), and commerical hosting costing even more- 
> bandwidth for something like Audifans is not easy to come by. 
> Currently we're hosted by an enterprise-class facility which has 
> provided incredible reliability, and they're willing to do for free 
> so in part because we're neither greedy nor 'high maintenance'. So 
> when we ask you to trim your posts, we have our reasons, as you can 
> see. Often the reasons are plentiful. 
> 
> -You're asked to respect others. In fact, the exact wording is: 
> "never attack, put down, etc another lister. We are a community of 
> enthusiasts who are here to fix our cars and have a good time...this 
> is simply not acceptable and you may find yourself subject to 
> disciplinary action." There are some warnings about using sarcasm 
> with people you don't know well, etc. 
> 
> That's pretty much it; there's little stuff not really relevant. 
> These rules have been up on the "help" section of the site for 
> several years, accessible by clicking "help" on the site banner, then 
> "Posting Guidelines". It's not asking much (if you disagree, email 
> me in private with how you feel you're not getting your money's worth). 
> 
> As for all of those who felt it necessary to make fun of my name- the 
> last person who did that was a classmate of mine, who back in middle 
> school, went around shooting his BB gun into kids' bedroom windows at 
> night (not mine, he didn't get very far from his house before the 
> cops found him hiding in a bush with the gun in his hands). If you 
> want to be associated with that kind of individual and age group, be 
> my guest- but I'd suggest growing up. In the words of Ellen 
> Degeneres- "That's what they called me in 4th grade". 
> 
> Brett 
> -- 
> "They that give up essential liberty to obtain temporary 
> safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Ben Franklin 
> http://www.users.cloud9.net/~brett/ 
> _______________________________________________ 
> S-CAR-List mailing list 
> S-CAR-List at audifans.com 
> http://www.audifans.com/mailman/listinfo/s-car-list