It's a simply matter. You want me to follow the rules. That is what accepted when I registered. If you want me to follow the rules, then state the rules that I should follow.
It's not really that simple. We can't possibly enumerate every single thing that we don't want to see in the forums. To some degree we have to involve common sense (which we directly address in the rules). And as we have long noted in the
registration agreement:
The owners of MacRumors reserve the right to:
- remove, edit, move, or close any discussion or message for any reason.
- close memberships that are detrimental to the forum community.
- make changes to the forum rules without notice.
This is really a minor issue that has cropped up here and there for as long as this forum has been active. It's not something we want to make a big deal out of, and nobody ever has before. Which is why we have always just quietly deleted such posts and in some cases given the posters a heads-up about why the posts were removed.
I agree that the Reminder system can appear too harsh for this sort of issue, despite our efforts to tone it down. If you had received a personalized PM explaining why the posts were removed, would that have been acceptable?
We try to use the Reminder system to make it easier to send notes to our members and to keep our own records of what we're doing so that other mods can see what's going on. But in some cases a personal PM is likely to be more well-received and may be worth the additional time and effort it takes to craft and document one. The difficulty is determining and agreeing on where that line should be.
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Some personal thoughts, not necessarily indicative of the views of the site and in some ways only tangentially related to this direct issue:
We have many long-time posters who have expressed a yearning for the "good old days" when the environment was more collegial and less combative. I (and I'm sure many of the other mods) would like to see this too.
Oh so long ago the rules were much simpler and mods simply acted in accordance with common sense much of the time. But as the years have gone on we've been challenged more and more frequently, and the result is the tome of forum rules you now see.
I hate our list of rules. I wish we could rely on users' common sense and a willingness to take a vested interest in this place as their community. We're all in this together, and things would run a whole lot smoother if people could and would assume good intent rather than bad. I know...I'm expecting too much of an internet forum where trolling and sniping is all part of the game.
It shouldn't be members vs. staff, but after years of being backed into corners, we've had to develop a laundry list of rules and become more and more robotic about how each case is handled.
But I don't know what people expect...we hear such conflicting desires: Our rules are too limiting, or they're not explicit enough, or they're too long, or there's not enough consistency, or there's too much consistency and not enough flexibility and freedom of expression.
So we are where we are, and if we have to list each and every explicit rule, then that's something we can consider. Or we can accept that sometimes a post is something we'd rather not have in the forums even if there isn't an explicit rule about it, and we can deal with those on a case-by-case basis to have a little flexibility in handling the ever-evolving forums.