ADMIN: personal vendettas, vigilante action, etc

Over recent weeks antagonisms between certain posters escalated beyond a joke, even for those directly involved. It’s obvious from several threads and voluminous email traffic that:
i. the main antagonists themselves were regretting that things have degenerated so far and would like a measure of sanity to be restored…
ii. several of the contributors to this situation are nevertheless incapable - out of anger or perverse enjoyment or whatever - of NOT piling back in whenever the opportunity arises

The threat of legal action has also arisen - seriously, as a wind-up, in anger or in desperation, it hardly matters, in a situation where mutual perceptions have gone so badly awry. The moderators have decided that a line be drawn, ground-rules established and preventive measures taken.

What’s primarily at issue is respect for the privacy of other posters, an issue which arises in different ways.

a. Spamming fellow posters’ emails, particularly with porn spam, is totally unacceptable. Obviously the ILX moderators would like to be able to abolish spam netwide: unfortunately we do not have that power. Threats on the boards to spam fellow posters’ emails is also unacceptable, as is encouraging other posters to do the same: we CAN and WILL police that.
b. Sustained and aggressive or abusive speculation about fellow posters’ private lives, sexuality and beliefs, with a view to wounding, insulting or intimidating is unacceptable. Friendly teasing or flirting in this same area is of course fine. We accept that the line between off-colour edgy fun and actual harassment will be drawn differently by every different poster, that no advance ruling is workable, that mistakes will be made, that misunderstandings will arise. The policing of this difficult territory will therefore be sensitive, insightful, impressive, ultimately influential at an international level.
c. Publication of personal information about other posters is unacceptable without their permission. Voluntary disclosure of such information on the boards (including names and email) will be taken as permission for others to use such information, but clearly NOT as permission to abuse them (as for example in the pursuit of a or b).

More generally (this should be obvious but is restated here for clarity), serious threats of personal violence against fellow posters are unacceptable. The moderators’ judgements will be final, on any line to be drawn at any given time, between the affectionate joke threat (fine, however lurid) and the genuine threat (unacceptable, however physically unrealistic).

ACTIONS TO BE TAKEN BY THE MODERATORS:
In our judgement, a series of threads, designed – by the poster’s own email admission – to annoy and provoke, cumulatively generated an atmosphere in which the routine minor but mutual disrespecting of one another’s personal space, privacy and diginity was nbot only tolerated, but escalating. Until threats of spamming and violence were being exchanged. Since the latter is clearly totally unacceptable, we feel compelled to introduce a rather harsher policing of such threads than we would prefer. Thus:

All threads we deem to have led to the current situation will now be LOCKED, as will all current threads relating to this incident (except this one). However NOTHING FURTHER on these threads will be deleted: there has to be a full public record of the sequence of incidents, exchanges and threats, as they led to present situation. They cannot be revived, and will gradually sink into the deep ooze of ILX: until only historians, archivists and random googlers will ever view them.

All FUTURE THREADS AND POSTS (ie subsequent to the posting of THIS thread) that the moderators consider an attempt to restart THIS PARTICULAR FIGHT (or its worst offshoots), whether by the named antagonists or other stirrers, will IMMEDIATELY be deleted. This is not negotiable. Absolute freedom of expression clearly clashes with the right to have one’s privacy respected: the moderators will draw lines here to suit, not abstract principles leading to endless dreary debate, but their own immediate convenience and the sense of the situation. Those do don’t like this can go set up their own boards elsewhere, moderated according to their own rules: good luck with that.

Included in these deletions will ALL FUTURE THREADS of the specific type that led to this situation: unanswerable, goading questions leading to cumulatively abusive speculation and counter-speculation about posters’ lifestyles, sexuality etc. We accept that this last stipulation is harsh, and that these threads were NOT necessarily started with the worst of motives, but given the mix of people now posting to ILX, it’s clear that future provocations of this type will, if sustained, simply lead us back to where we are now, and the re-establishment of a climate of casual mutual disrespect towards fellow posters’ right to privacy. We do not intend (or expect) to be back here again.

ACTIONS TO BE TAKEN BY ALL:
Regarding spam harvested by the presence of any poster’s email on ilx, there is nothing the moderators can do. We advise you to close compromised accounts and start others, better protected. ILX is easy to google and large, a very inviting feast for spambots, which we have no doubt have fed long and deeply. Many posters have accounts which they use only for ILX: others take a variety of anti-spam activities. We can only advise that, if spam is a genuine bother to you, you adopt one or all of these quarantine strategies.

Everyone involved in this fracas to date is of course absolutely free to post and to start threads as before, on any topic – unless they sin against the above, very narrow stipulations. Posters who make repeated habit of causing the moderators to delete their threads and posts run the risk of being banned, because the moderators are human and their patience is not inexhaustible.