Hmm, maybe you're right, Ringo. But the Daily-Maily-fication of the board continues apace - this thread is a prime example, but it's far from the only one - and I know for a fact that long-standing posters are disengaging as a result. I maintain that something is going awry with the spread of opinions expressed if I can take at face value what was meant to be parodic.
I was going to message you privately, Krepostnoi, but the point, I think, could usefully be made for general consumption as it also relates to some disagreements on another recently active thread.
We do all we can to maintain a place when a very broad church can congregate and have closed off all of the major conduits for (non-Fortean) bile. We also urge (and here I urge again) members to try to be 'community minded', but, in the end, members are entitled to their viewpoints as long as they express them in ways that adhere to our rules here.
It would be impossible for we--the staff--to rigorously police the membership's opinions; simply being wrong (in whatever sense) is not a breach of the guidelines, and we rely on
other members to post refutations and corrections to bad posts. If somebody lapses into abuse or outright hatred, we'll likely be addressing the matter before the majority of you even notice the post, but in normal circumstances we expect the fatuous, the idiotic and the mildly mean-spirited to be countered by the community as a whole without the staff needing to bang heads and take names.
It hasn't been too bad at all these past couple of months, but earlier in the year and for most of the two years before that, we spent too much time smoothing ruffled feathers behind the scenes. The line from Stu, which I agree with, is that although we share the concern that Krepostnoi raises (and he certainly isn't alone in having it) that a number of long-term posters do not like the tone of some of the discussions here (again, typically non-Fortean), there is only so much we can practically do (much of which has been done), and efforts to coax members back on a one-to-one basis (even those we dearly wish to retain) are labour-intensive and more than often ineffective.
A message doomed to please nobody, I fear.
(Opinions welcome by PM to me or any other mod you spot online--although two are away at the time of writing).