Lewis' Blog Tales from the trenches of information technology

8Jul/120

When forum moderation goes a bit too far

It happened that I needed to seek some insight from the good folks in the openSuSE community forums. Now, while I haven't posted a tremendous amount over there (only a handful of entries since 2008 or so), I have added a tip or two, and of course, I've regularly contributed to the Novell forums for many years.

So you can imagine how rubbed the wrong way I was to receive a private message from one of the sysadmins concerning my signature and the inclusion of (heaven forbid!) a couple "commercial" links in it.

Okay, it's their forum. I can't complain. I apologized for the oversight. (The current forum software is so difficult to configure, I can't even figure out where to add my signature to my profile, so I had to manually paste it in.)

However, when I stopped by one of my posts which happened to include two - yes, that's T-W-O, as in one more than one - lines of terminal input, I was really annoyed to see a gentle reminder from that same sysadmin (publicly, this time) to use CODE tags around terminal text.

Really? For TWO lines?

<sigh>

It was then that I recalled that the openSuSE forums were available via NNTP (just like the Novell forums). I'm in heaven again...