I think it may just be the perfect time to start an offshoot group of Orchid for those individuals who need an attitude adjustment. Some people live for confrontation.
This has been bothering me a lot lately due to an outrageous post a
number of weeks ago, and your post gives me an opportunity to
address it.
Some people do use online forums just for confrontation, but that
isn’t the issue here. Actual instances of confrontation on Orchid,
while they may be vigorous and even angry, far more often than not
are mature and responsible. A few are so childish they are easy to
ignore.
What has been happening that I have problems with is bullying, not
confrontation. It is calling people names, impugning their honesty,
to shut them up or to undermine their credibility. There isn’t a
great deal of it on Orchid, but there is some, and some of it has
been outrageous in recent months. It has bothered me enough that I’ve
posted about it twice recently and really should have said something
6 or 8 weeks ago.
By an offshoot group, if you mean excluding bullies and restricting
their posts to a subset forum such as Orchid. Ill-mannered, that
isn’t going to happen. It is the moderator’s job to filter input,
and in my opinion Hanuman is moderating wisely; generously on the
side of free speech, allowing grown-ups to be grown-ups by fighting
their own battles when challenged. If you mean, and I think you do
not, that a group of members elect themselves to confront the
ill-mannered, that is a somewhat different issue.
When I read some of these rude posts my blood pressure goes up, and
when I write a reply, that just seems to amplify my annoyance for a
long time. It isn’t pleasant. So I can understand why many people who
are directly being bullied choose to ignore it. It isn’t for me to
tell others how they should respond, but more often than not,
ignoring bullying is the same thing as enabling it. Orchid will be
what it is allowed to be, and if all of us take the comfortable route
of ignoring bullying then we are going to be subject to more of it,
to everyone’s loss.
Orchid does not need a self-appointed group to challenge bullies
(not that I believe that is what you meant), but it would go a long
way if more people took more of a stand, and in their own way of
expressing themselves let it be known that ‘such and such’ is not
acceptable and ‘not the kind of thing I want to see on Orchid’.
As with most things, you get the quality you insist on, or you get
the rubbish some people think they can get away with.
Neil A.