In case you ever come back here to catch up on your amazing thread, I actually checked on the order more than once before I posted. The post where you dropped all the insults was post #8. The post gregorio edited and said you were too old for the Internet if you thought that was an insult was post #9.

You can only get a 2 week ban in the Ban Me! thread, so that's what I gave you. Hopefully some time to cool off and get some perspective might help; this site is a great resource and it would be a shame for you to write it off because of some hurt feelings over a couple of posts.

Move up to where they respect you unsubscribes, imo.

In normal life, when someone is offended by what you've said, you usually apologize. Often there's something about how you can understand how your comment could come off as callous, but you didn't mean it that way. The less you know someone, and the less you know about their personal life context or history, the more cautious you are. This is normal.

But not here. Here, you poke someone until he reacts, litter it with inside jokes for the clique, then point and laugh at him for being a crybaby.

Good times, good times.

Only on 2p2 are people defensive about hurting someone's feelings. Just apologize, empathize, and move on. Why try to prove that the person is too weak, or deserving of mocking, or anything else?

Do all of you talk like this to strangers you meet in life? Do you feel good about it? Proud that you're made of stronger stuff than the elderly inquisitive people you pushed out of the way on your path to awesomeness?

Here, Ill illustrate what I mean.

Or, y'know, something that's not immediate and extreme escalation. You can't expect the person who was upset NOT to be a bit grouchy about it.

Be better than this, 2+2. There's nothing lost by being nice to strangers. What's gained by being rude to them?

^ pfapfap's last two posts express my thoughts much more eloquently than I have.

I will not unsubscribe to this thread

How did this get overlooked without a debate?

Most people seem to use that phrase that way even though it doesn't make the point they think it does. I used to ask if that meant they care a lot or maybe a moderate amount, but they usually don't follow.

Try "How much less?"

While I don't entirely disagree with Eponymous and pfapfap about the tone around here in general, I just think you've picked a terrible thread to make the point in. For example, pfapfap, do you think a post like this:

is going to get an apologetic reply very often? How often is calling someone a kid going to bring out an apology?

I get that you're both taking issue with the general tone in ATF, but it's a shame you're allowing this to cloud your ability to see that OP overreacted in a big way to a pretty innocuous joke. Within just a few posts, OP managed to take this from "rookie play" to calling Gregorio a kid and then telling him to "Take the lollipop out of yer mouth and your keyboard out of yer arse!" - is this really the thread you want to take this stand in? And it's not like OP had only been here for a few days and was shocked by the tone in here - he's had an account for years, and I've seen plenty of his posts in the Zoo, which isn't exactly the most noobie-friendly forum at all times.

The way I allow my language nittery to relax is to think of it this way:

"I could care less... but I still don't give a crap."

Or something similar. You can find a context where it makes sense, and let that one go. It's worked for me, at least.

Fair enough, it might be the wrong timing to make a point of it, but I still see it a little differently.

Imagine you're at a poker table. Some goofy old dude sits down. Maybe he has a history of joking in the past, maybe not. Then some punk kid in a hockey jersey says some offhanded comment that the old dude finds offensive. Old dude bristles, says, "Don't talk to me like that, sonny! I didn't come here to get insulted!" Maybe this old dude had handled those comments well before, but something about today rubbed him the wrong way and he's being cranky about it.

Now, which would you more likely expect to see:

(a) Young guy go completely off the rails, keeping the argument going; or
(b) Young guy apologize and make peace.

Which one would make you go "damn, dude, too much?" Which would make you go, "Wow, handled very well, good show."

Which are YOU more likely to do, if you're the young guy in this scenario? When someone expresses that he's offended by you, do you try to find reason why he shouldn't be? Do you build an argument about how it's his fault he got offended, or that he overreacted?

I'm pretty sure you just apologize and smooth it over as quickly as possible. That's what people do in society. That's why we have society. Every one of us, including me, can find room every day to be a little nicer to someone else. It doesn't take much.

pfap, in principle I agree with your "be nicer" policy.

However, the only people I see you taking to task on this in ATF are the mods. Shouldn't you be calling out the rude posters as well? Telling them that if they asked questions or made suggestions more politely they would get the answers they want with more ease? Or is it just the mods that you think should be "nicer"?

I think I'm just aggravated that you seem to jump at the smallest incident of a mod being not 100% polite (within your definition) but never seeming pointing out the multitude of times we take a ton of **** or insults in these threads.

You called me out after I had gone out of my way to be helpful and polite but finally HAD to crack down on a noob poster who was spamming the hell out of NVG. How many more times should I have PMed him and told him not to start more NVG threads and to go to ATF? 5? 10?

Frankly, I'm sick of constantly getting accused of being a horrible person, and I'm done apologizing for doing my best to keep NVG to a reasonable level of chaos. If I sometimes come off as sarcastic, too ****ing bad. I'm incredibly polite/helpful the vast majority of the time, but JFC, I'm only human, and constantly having you chide us for not being nice enough is pretty grating.

RJ, I'm sorry, I didn't intend to imply that you're a horrible person. You're right, it does seem like I've focused on you a bit. I usually don't even look at names, just at words, but that doesn't change that from your end, it could feel targeted, and that's unfair of me. I'll dial down my sanctimoniousness in the future, because you generally seem pretty cool and reasonable in general, from what I've seen. Again, I'm sorry about that. Thanks for coming to me with it.

This thread isn't a mod, is it? Looks like a normal user to me, but I'm not up on all the colors.

But yes, I DO think the mods have a greater responsibility. As much as some of you like to say, "I'm just a normal poster, and you should react as such," the truth is that this simply isn't the case. You represent 2+2, and for most people, you're authority figures. We look to you for models on how to behave. When we have a problem, we expect you to be helpful. When someone who doesn't know better comes to ATF, he expects it to be friendly and honest and useful, not a bunch of snarky in-jokes.

Is it fair? Probably not. But we're in the casino industry. A big part of that is avoiding the appearance of impropriety. It's not good enough that we're honest and forthright, but we have to go out our way to make sure there's no question at all about it. Maybe if I roll the deck I'm not exposing cards to my buddy, but I might be, so that's why I don't do it.

In other words, those of us responsible for running poker games and managing poker rooms are required to hold ourselves to a much higher standard than we hold our customers.

It's the same for poker players. The true professionals hold THEMSELVES to higher standards of etiquette and consequence than they do the others at the table. Because they're not competitors, they're proprietors. They're operating on a different level, and with that comes greater responsibility.

So, yeah, mods should be NICER than the average user. That's why you're mods. You're our leaders. Lead.

Eponymous, thanks for the props. I always hesitate to align myself with someone else's cause, because the pfapfap brand isn't exactly helpful for most folks around here.

Apology accepted.

And I think the real problem here is that it's entirely possible that mods ARE nicer than the average user, and that's just not readily apparent from reading ATF. A lot of that has to do with the type of complaints that come to ATF (and you can, at least, acknowledge that a lot of them are...weak, right?), and some of the general fun that happens in ATF threads that, yes, can be pretty offputting to a new poster who doesn't realize that the jibes are in jest.

However, for every one ATF thread, there's hundreds, if not thousands of posters that are helped by mods every day in posts and PMs. Regular posters do this as well - in general, I think the 2p2 community is pretty helpful/generous - but since mods are, as you say, leaders, it's natural that sometimes posters come to us when they have a question. And probably 99% of the time, they get a friendly, prompt response and go away with the answer and are happy with the experience.

It feels like you are making a broad judgement (the mods aren't nice enough/don't lead enough) based on a very small sample.

And frankly, it's all well and good to say "you were made a leader, so lead", but when you actually lack the type of authority that would be necessary, you're sort of a toothless leader.

Fair enough, you're right. What comes here is generally the tail end of something.

I just think everybody could stand to be nicer (myself included), and these sometimes make for easy, if perhaps unfair, examples.

How are y'all toothless? You can infract and ban. You hold all the power. Also, I've found that people who are nice and fair enough gain the respect and support of those around them. There's a special kind of power to that.

The power to infract/ban on an individual level and to lock threads isn't really that important.

The users (in general) decide what does and does not fly in their forums. NVG is nowhere near as "polite" as I personally would like, but if I tried to enforce my ideal on everyone, I would (rightly) catch a lot of flak. I'm one person - the users have the right to their experience, and despite all the talk of Nazi mods, ultimately it's usually what they want that flies.

Maybe toothless wasn't the right word, but in a forum with 1000s of regs and 16 mods (only have of which are all that active), we don't really have as much power as you seem to think. Having actually been what one would call a leader in the past (in the military), I find my "power" on here to be funny more than anything else.

I think that goes for the vast majority of people on the Internet, and it's why your poker table analogy fails. Or if you look at it another way, it demonstrates that a lot of us would never talk to people in person the same way we do online.

I find I go through cycles here (insert PMS joke) when it comes to posting style. I get gradually more and more cynical, and thus more sarcastic. Then one day I realize I'm being a bit more of an ******* than usual - either because someone calls me out or I just notice it myself - and I try to reset back to more of my easygoing RL personality. Then I gradually get worse, reset, etc., etc.

I reset recently, so now I'm on the way down again.

pfap i like you but you sound like a hippie d-bag imo.

With most people, if you're mean to them first, then reward them with niceness, they're very easy to manipulate. I'm sure that bit of psychology served you well in the military.

I may not be viewing power the same way you are? If the subforum has certain policies, then of course you can't try to enforce something that's not in line with policy. But that doesn't mean you need to join in the fray. When I'm dealing a poker table, I don't take part in all the ribbing and chatter that happens at the table: I'm there to make sure everything goes smoothly. And the nicer and cleaner and slicker and more professional I am when I'm not needing to influence behavior, the more power I have when I am. But if I'm just one of the crowd of people acting like animals, then why should anybody listen to or respect what I have to say?

In an online community I joined years ago, the moderators had different accounts for their "one of you" vs "okay, time to shape up" business. The moderator accounts were purely moderator accounts, not social accounts. That's probably unfeasible here, but it seemed to work well enough there. Even though you knew it was the same person, when the message came from the moderator account, you knew it was time to pay attention. Like mommy putting on her stern face.

I agree, and I think that's a shame. I've certainly gotten to the ends of posts and not submitted simply because I stopped and thought, "Would I talk like this in person? Have I allowed too much snark to seep through?" (Me, writing MORE than you see? I know, right? )

But I don't think the analogy is a complete failure, in that it helps us see how starkly different things are on here. Whenever you find yourself needing to defend why you're criticizing someone and why he deserves it or should learn to take a joke... well, there's a communication breakdown there. If everybody waits for the OTHER person to apologize first, then no progress is ever made.

Heh, yeah, me too. Right now I'm in my "why can't we all be friends?" portion of my cycle.

I can be a hippie and I can be a douchebag. I try to lessen the latter, and I've made strides, but I still have work to do.

Tho' maybe I don't see hippie as a criticism? I care about the environment, I care about helping others, I'm willing to sacrifice my wealth for the sake of those less fortunate, I ride a bicycle instead of a car, and I don't buy pineapples, bananas, or diamonds. I also lived in Berkeley for a decade.

I don't preach about niceness in person, because, as observed, online vs personal interactions ARE different. I just do what I can to lead by example. So far, this has worked quite well for me, and for those around me.

It's enjoyable being surrounded by people who are having a good time, and who like having you there. I'm not sure why anybody would want anything different. Unfortunately for me, I've allowed certain undesirable aspects of my personality to become highlighted a few times too many around here, but that's my cross to bear, and I try to improve myself every day. Most people I know personally have a far different view of me than my haters on here.

Why in the world would you not buy bananas?

I feel that as a wealthy nation, we've come to exploit too many of the world's resources for our own personal luxury. And while it's hard for one person to give up everything, there are some things that just seem too egregious and unimportant to lifestyle to justify continued patronage.

On one level, there's just the sheer amount of FUEL, a very limited resource, that's required for shipping alone. It's obscene that we're wasting this precious resource so we can have banana splits. And when you consider how far they need to travel, you start to think about how much of the product must be wasted on the journey, and the chemical and genetic engineering that goes into producing the most hardy banana.

And that doesn't even touch on exploitation of banana-growing regions. Read up on the United Fruit Company. This isn't some ancient history stuff, this is reasonably in reach of our own lifetimes. This is Chiquita Banana. Dole ain't no different.

And where is this money going? Not to your local farmers. Sure, everybody who touches it does get a taste, but it mostly goes to the giant corporations. This is why they exist. This is why they are giant.

Just seems like too much to justify. And I love bananas and pineapples. I buy locally grown produce whenever possible. Still helps shopkeepers and local taxes, and the money stays here.

So yeah, I'm a hippie. Sorry to preach, but, hey, you asked.

I like this. Will try it in the future. They probably still won't get it, though.

I'll concede that the OP escalated this way more than necessary before either you or RJ "piled on," so that wasn't fair on my part given the chronology of events.

For the record, I like the tone in ATF in general, which is probably why I find myself spending more time here. I like reading and making sarcastic comments that imo often help move the conversation along as well as "straight" posts, but with some added entertainment value. If I do the same in B&M, anything but a humorless facts-only response gets auto-deleted, which makes for a pretty boring forum. But noobs can get bullied around here, which I don't think should be part of the tone, and yes, it wasn't the 2p2 people that escalated it in this thread.