The admin staff is free to have their own reasons to agree with things. Spartan was explaining his own personal reason for supporting this course of action. As for myself, I do not mind how badly outnumbered I am--Aristasians don't live, as a matter of principle, for numbers, and don't make compromises with the Pit and bongos for the sake of recruiting--but rather because I felt I had genuinely sinned by not promoting a more harmonious environment on this board. I actually want us all to be friends... As silly as that may sound to you. We are very much alone in a hostile world, and we need to stay together--including the leftists who remain brave enough to support free speech in an era when even free speech is under assault. To me, that includes being civil to each other.
Thing is,
genuine friends are, in part, marked by their ability to say "fuck you" and worse to each other without getting angry at each other. Of course, that is after they have already become friends so... yeah. But so far, during either lurking or posting, I do not really recall any incidents where incivility led to extreme conflicts. Now, I might have missed stuff, especially since I only found this forum relatively recently, but strigently enforcing formal civility rules seems kinda overkill to me as a) 99% of people here followed them
anyway and b) those 1% who didn't weren't really a problem (at least from what I have seen; correct me if I'm wrong). So basically, in my opinion you are kinda overreacting.
Just my 2c. I am not against civility, but your post (and few other Staff posts in this thread) give me impression that you are trying to achieve something which simply cannot be achieved by such measures. Basically, laws are there to cover the area where culture has failed - but your stated goal can only be achieved by culture. I do not think anyone had any problems with what I posted anywhere on this forum despite the fact that I
literally do not remember any of the rules. Yes, I have read them when registering and a couple of times afterwards, but I never could remember such stuff. I usually eventually quit posting on forums where rules were too numerous and too strigently enforced because anything beyond what was self-understood as part of basic civility and forum culture was something I was never able to follow, because, again, I am literally incapable of memorizing any formal stuff - which includes the rules (just to explian, but my entire memory process works by understanding logic behind something and then retroactively applying said logical process to literally reconstruct the memory). But even so, on vast majority of forums, I never had any problems with either other users or staff (and one forum I got permabanned on, it was precisely under their own version of civility rules - though these were designed to promote leftist PC atmosphere, so... kinda not comparable at all).
In short: if you want constructive forum atmosphere, best way to do it is by
having constructive forum atmosphere. Rules are literally the last option you should take.
Perhaps instead of dooming about asking people to not be dicks is the end of the forum at some unspecified point in the future, there may be wisdom in giving it a week or two and actually observing with your own eyes what actually happens?
Then make a choice about deleting yourselves.
Oh, that I certainly agree with. But still, this kind of move - no matter how mild or well-intended - was
guaranteed to lose you a portion of userbase. It simply smells bad to people who are likely paranoid about that stuff anyway since I assume good portion of them was hit for holding positions to the right of Lenin
under guise of maintaining civility (as I was). And that is the crux of it. Or as the saying goes,
he who gets burned once will blow onto the cold as well. Quite a few left-leaning forums have purged their userbase by using their sort of civility rules as a pretext, so while I do agree that whole alarm over this is kinda overblown - especially since civility rules applied fairly are exactly what leftists don't want - I also understand where it is coming from.