As I was reading Thomas Hawk’s post earlier about a real problem he is having with one of the Flickr forums where he is an administrator I found myself relating to what he was having to deal with.

It turns out that there is a forum member who is being nothing short of a real asshole. Not your run of the mill kind of asshole as they are rather easy to deal with but the kind of asshole who thinks it just fine to threaten physical harm to whoever has pissed them off. In this case the asshole is a putz by the name of James Rhodes and he thinks it just fine to suggest to Thomas how easy it would have been to mug him at a recent convention

“Must be the Sicilian in me, just can’t let things go…. still have yet to pay a visit to EA, and TH doesn’t know how close he came at the dream machines event at that airport on the coast…. and TH never really did anything… I just wanted to make an example of him… good thing I realized that he never said or did anything… I would have felt horrible afterwords….”

well to be clear I never threatened you, I just watched you from a distance. You never knew I was there, and you would have never know why someone would have “mugged” you in the parking lot…..it would have all been a strange coincidence…

Now as I have mentioned in the past one of my other blogging endeavors is WinExtra, which also has a long standing (actually older than the blog) community forums. I have been running those forums in their various forms for almost ten years now and in all that time I have only had to step in and threaten to ban two individuals, with one person actually ending up being banned.

While the community around the forums is like a daily meeting of old friends who chat about cool stuff along with helping people out with computer and software problems, the members have always acted like friends which makes managing the forums a joy. The only exception to the standing rules of behavior for the forums is The Cage and it was design specifically to be a no-holds barred “you’d better wear your asbestos underwear” type of area.

I learned very early in my days of running NNTP newsgroups that if you don’t have a specific area where people can blow of steam trouble can erupt at the drop of the hat anywhere in your newsgroups. Hence there being The Cage but while the language can get rough and heritages can be called into question the one thing I have never allowed in The Cage, or the other areas either is personal threats of physical harm.

It doesn’t matter if the chances of it ever occurring are next to nil. What matters is that even though you can be as mad as hell at someone that doesn’t give you the right to threaten physical harm – period.

One of the times I did threaten to ban someone it was for that very reason. It didn’t matter that the threat was made in The Cage, which is suppose to be no-holds barred. What mattered was that someone threatened another person with physical harm and that is not acceptable any place or under any conditions. So the person was given one week to make a public apology and to email me with a promise that it wouldn’t happen again.

The end result was the apology was made and no ban was instituted. I would do exactly the same thing in Thomas Hawk’s situation. Flickr should have stepped in immediately and either outright banned the person or provided them with a chance to apologize.

The Internet might be considered to be the wild west but that doesn’t mean we have to act like complete dickwads. What James Rhodes said, and alluded to, is unacceptable but equally as bad is the lack of action and support from Flickr in this case.