This isn't about me versus Dread, or the mod team versus anyone. It's about trying to do right by EVERYONE who is vested in this decision.
Let me be candid for a moment, about a couple of things, if I may. First of all, I have been a moderator for almost three years. I started as a moderator because I
asked to moderate FYM. (Yes, hard to believe, but true.) I had modded another forum in the past and I genuinely believe it's a good thing to do: to try to uphold civility in the largely unchartered, even now, territory that is Internet ethics. If I may be grandiose, it's a bit like being one of the first Mounties (our Canadian friends may now that Mounties originated in response to the lawlessness of the American West in the frontier days; Mounties went ahead of Canadian pioneers to ascertain that law and order would be waiting for them in the West). In that time as a mod, I've had to make some quick, easy decisions and some long, agonizing decisions. Sometimes I've conferred with one or two other mods, sometimes I've conferred with the whole team, and sometimes I've had to make calls all by myself. Such is the nature of moderating.
This is the first time I've ever made a decision in this manner, and I will be extremely frank as to why I did this: I had, and have, no idea what is the right thing to do. I have read intelligent, heartfelt arguments from both sides of the issue. I do not own this forum. Neither does any individual poster. Faced with the obvious controversy of having to make
some decision about the continuation of the thread, I did what I thought would be the
least controversial thing: rather than choose myself the best course of action, I left it up to the post-ers in this forum. Was that, at least, the right call? I firmly believe that it was.
This leads me to my next point: When you post a thread here, or anywhere, it's not exactly
yours anymore. By the very act of posting a thread, you invite disagreement, debate, derailment, humor, and many other things. You can encourage people to post in certain ways; if you're nice to mods, you can have mods do it for you!
But, ultimately, a thread becomes the property of the community. And it is now the decision of many people what happens to it, unless it gets nasty and a mod does have to decide by fiat what happens to it.
Contrary to popular belief (and, admittedly, my own joking about it), I don't enjoy closing threads. I would love to see a Free Your Mind, and a whole Interference at that, where people could ramble and laugh and argue for pages upon pages and then all get together for a drink in the Octagon--in the O'Neill/Reagan tradition, if you will. But that is in a perfect world. In our world, things go bad. More than one party occupies the grounds of right and wrong.
To sum it all up, if you've started to skim: No one owns that thread, or any thread in this forum. And I believe I did the right thing. And I have the support of the team, too. I'm honestly sorry that we couldn't reserve just one thread in this whole place for lack of discord and argument, but it didn't work that way--and BOTH sides, dare I suggest this, contributed to the arguing.
So now I leave it to you to decide the thread's fate.
And that, as I've said before, is that.