>I really think the ball is in our court. If we can't be civil and observe some rules of decorum even when we disagree, we don't deserve to have a water cooler section.
>
>What I would really like to see is chatter morphing back into the amiable, enjoyable place it used to be. My head was nodding up and down the whole time I read JimB's post. It takes a lot to aggravate him so when he is I think it should be taken as a sign that something has gone too far.

I'm probably guilty of failing to notice - I was skipping dozens of threads recently, sometimes filtering them out, sometimes not.

Just looked it up - 11 threads filtered out this year, and 14 more for the previous six months (which is when I probably last cleaned up the list), which is about twice the rate. Seven of the 25 threads originated by the same person, five by another one. It should be noted that I'm not skipping those threads because of uncivility (well, most of them) but rather because of their content being utterly unattractive to me (sports, soaps, right-wing propaganda). More a matter of where I don't want to be seen ;).

>This should be enjoyable, after all. Of course people will sometimes disagree but if there is a constant tone of strife and disrespect, as there has been lately, we have diverged from rules more basic than any Michel might set up -- the rules of ordinary civility.

That's surely one envelope which shouldn't have been pushed.