I'm with Allyson--let's just warn her. If she explains that, as I suspect, she's a high-functioning mentally ill/disabled person, fine, we'll self-MARCIE or engage her as we each see fit. If she reforms, fine. If she says "screw you guys", then ban her. And give her a deadline of a week or so to respond, in case she just ignores the whole process, which is also something she might do. I hate to see good people and longtime posters in such a tizzy about this.

Sorry to be so blunt, but I think this would be a win/win situation, even for Zoe herself.

Edit: If she ignores the deadline totally and refuses to explain herself, I would send her a stronger warning and say if she doesn't respond with an explanation/apology by deadline 2, she's banned.

If we have community standards and a method for enforcing them, then we should. If violating the community standards is fine, then let's change them.

As far as I can tell, everyone here is human. Everyone here has limits on their patience. I'm surprised it took this long for Zoe to make it to Bureaucracy. I'm averse to the term "piling on". If I say something that people like, and 15 posts after me go "yay, ita!", it's dead parallel to me pissing folks off and being followed by "god, you suck". Is it piling on for me to express a previously stated negative reaction, but one-true-buffista-lovey-dovey for me to add my cheer?

Why? The key for me is that I want Buffista A to know my reaction to their post. It just so happens that it took me longer to get my point onto the net than other posters, but so be it. Everything I post is open for response from every registered poster. Hell, I think I've had someone REGISTER just so they could disagree with me.

If I didn't know that was a factor, I'd go play in a chat room where my posts are ephemeral.

That having been said, I'm a person of little enough patience, I feel. I don't really care to have to explain "Oh, Buffista A can be as profanely homophobic and jerky as she likes -- she's touched in the head. But you have to be nice, unless you show us a note from the doctor." I can't do that. I can't get past it, sorry. And I'm disappointed I'm being asked to do it.

I don't care about having behaviour explained. "I was pissing people off because of A B and C ..."

Whatever. It is quite apparent that a lot of people are being pissed off and having their posting experience tainted. That's what the community standards are here to prevent.

And it's not a "veterans piling on" thing to me either. If someone who'd been posting 3 days was offended by something, anything, that violates community standards, their opinion is valid. Statistically speaking, those who complain are likely to be vets, because there are more vets posting, and even though it took this long, perhaps vets are more likely to speak up. But should they not, just because they've been posting here since year dot?

I'd also like to point out that when she's posting, Zoe is nearly every other post in the Angel thread. Makes it difficult to self-MARCIE. For me, at least.

I almost entirely agree with ita; my only little quibble is that my mother has a head injury and sometimes she also veers off the tracks, so I know how strange and quirky such things can make a person. If Zoe didn't show signs of that, fine; but she does IMO.

If she didn't, then hell yeah, we got rules, let's enforce them and stop the hand-wringing.

Jesus fucking Christ.

Apparently people have left because of the mieskie/Schmoker kerfluffle. And now I can see why.

I've read everything that was posted last night.

It seems way more important to bed over backwards to accomodate people who don't give a damn about the community, which in turn drives out people who DID give a big damn about the community.

Why is that? It seems self-destructive.

Kat said this:

If nothing is done, then it's a bit of a smack in the face of people who are upset and feeling irritated and feeling like this person is being deliberately rude and upsetting (note: I'm not one of these people. I just don't like to see the community turmoil her posts can cause). If we don't say anything to this poster, how can we justifiably say anything in the future to other posters who are strange, off putting and unwilling to be part of the community?

And I couldn't agree more. What are we to actually do, demand a notarized doctor's note? I mean, seriously. If not, anyone could come in, claim to have a mental problem, and post disruptive shit over and over and over and over.

I feel like warning for rude behaivor (as opposed to attacking or abusive behaivor) is a little too Orwellian.

Really? Because if I did the same things she's doing, I would hope that you all would cut me some slack on the first instance, because anyone could be having a bad day. But if I repeatedly posted disruptive, rude posts that sometimes come across as bigoted, I would expect a warning. Well, I would expect in-thread requests to tone it down. But if I ignored them, I would expect a warning.

And this (by, I think, Cindy) sums up my feelings perfectly:

People have taken it upon themselves to say, "Excuse me, but you were being offensive." She doesn't apologize and makes the situation worse. It happens over and over, so much so that there were 200 posts about her behavior when I came to the board today. People finally bring it up in here, something that Buffistas loathe to do because you're all bending over backwards to appear polite and open to all. And now they're being told to cite and use footnotes and present relevent case histories? People have already linked to specific instances and mentioned the threads in which the flare-ups occurred. If you care so much, go look. I did.

This is from ita:

I don't really care to have to explain "Oh, Buffista A can be as profanely homophobic and jerky as she likes -- she's touched in the head. But you have to be nice, unless you show us a note from the doctor."

Right. That's bullshit of the highest order. Mostly because this is a private posting board. We have standards we set up, and when people come in and violate them, people's responses have been, by and large, not to enforce the standards, but to give excuses for the people who violate them.

And again I want to know why.

Our standards are not unreasonable. In the standards, we encourage newbies to lurk in order to get the tone of the place -- although others, like Miracleman, we able to jump right and and hit the ground running. Anyone who lurked for even a few hours would see what a broad range of topics, ideas, and ways of expressing those ideas are present here.

This is not a board that stifles expression. All we ask is play nice. Is it REALLY that hard?

And why are we making excuses for the people who won't play nice?

I'm NOT saying that I'm going to leave, so don't read this as a melodramatic threat. I'm here, and I'm staying. But I can totally understand why the mieskie/schmoker incident drove people -- people I LIKE -- away.

Because it seems we give a way bigger damn about the TWO people who won't play nice than we do about the hundreds of people who do.

t runs up behind Steph wearing "What Steph Said" sandwich board

Really, I have to go, so I honestly look forward to peoples thoughts when I get back.

But the more I think about it, the more it burns me up that we're hurting our community by being over-accomodating to TWO people who haven't shown a single sign of wanting to meet us halfway. Or a quarter of the way. Or at all.

Maybe we should be more accomodating of the hundreds of posters (and hundreds more lurkers) who DO follow community standards.

I am an occasional poster, and, as such, I don't often feel engaged enough in the community to call someone on what I feel is inappropriate behavior. This also affords me a higher level of tolerance and the ability to self-filter/ignore topics and/or posters fairly well.

That being said, Zoe has pinged my radar more than once. I think askye made a really good point when she said

Not to mention the fact that if (excluding the day after a new show) I see a huge jump in posts in Buffy/Angel thread my first thought is to wonder what Zoe has said now to piss people off and dread reading the thread. Even if she said nothing at all that's still my first thought.

Yesterday afternoon, I left work at 5:00est. The Angel thread hadn't been extraordinarily busy during the last couple of hours, but Kat had made her request. When I checked back into the board an hour or so later, there were 84 new posts. I thought things were exploding again. (They were, but only with Lindsey-lust.)

This is not the first time I have had this reaction. I read the show threads and have seen Zoe cause friction there on several occasions. I am surprised that it took this long for anyone to officially complain, but I chalked it up to being gun-shy.

In the general sense, I disagree with the reason that if we warn a troll because we give them what they want. If we aren't going to enforce standards on obvious trolls, there is no point to having standards. This may or may not apply to Zoe.

She has corrected her behavior before, though it took time and a more official warning. I am thinking specifically of her repeated instances of responding to "Beep Me" posts in "Beep Me". I may be misremembering the specific details, but I recall a poster complaining about the natter, and a Stompy posted a general reminder in "Press" and may have issued a specific reminder to Zoe in a show thread while she was posting. Whatever the exact chain of events, Zoe did respond and correct her behavior.

I think that an official notice is warranted, acceptable, and may well produce the desired effect. If it doesn't, the issue will have to be readdressed. I'm sorry this has become divisive, but really, it's been divisive for a while. It just took Kat to address the issue, and I'm sorry she felt attacked and excused herself.

I spent a lot of time trying to create a post that summed up my feelings on this, and then checked to see if anything else came in while I was doing so, only to find that Steph had already said almost everything I was going to.

Just to add on though:

Let's just send her a warning already. Yes it bothers me that I feel we need to take that step, but what this is doing to the community bothers me more.

Victor is right, people here have been rude to her, but I truly believe that's because nothing else has worked. People have ignored her. People have tried to figure out her posts and put a better spin on them. People have asked her to explain herself. People have asked her to stop being rude. People have asked her to change or go away.

She won't. It's time to force the issue.

At the risk of making myself a wanking, Orwellian nitpicker...

Yes, that's a joke. Possibly not a very good one, but I'm really amused by the mental image.

Zoe's posts often give me an uncomfortableness. Maybe this makes me a reactionary git. For the record, again, I'm not calling for her head on a plate. I don't get along with every Buffista equally, and I've managed to get by all right so far.

Hell, at this point, I'm not personally calling for any community action. I just wanted to state my discomfort because I felt like there was a pile-on in here against people who have been upset and baffled by Zoe's behavior.

So, whatever. I'll continue to use my personal MARCIE and follow Kat out of Bureaucracy.