To Robert and all of the other lurkers who share his feeelings,

The role of a sysop is a difficult one. If we as sysops start to censure the postings of people we become the "big brothers" of the UT. While there are certain clearly written rules of conduct, many of those rules are subjective at best. The objective rules are easy to enforce, the subjective rules are very difficult. What represents profanity to one person is not the same for another person. What represents an insult to one is not the same for another. Some people have a history with one and other which many folks aren't aware of, these histories come into play in their exchanges.

We are all adults here and we should act like adults and treat each other as adults. As an adult I have the option of reading a thread or not reading it. If the thread degrades, I can skip and move on to another thread. Or if I prefer, I can enter the foray going on. It is totally up to me.

The sysops do communicate with the people who post questionable messages regularly, but we do it privately because it is no else's business who got chastized and who didn't. The sysops are not "on vacation" they are all actively working to keep the UT the premier site for support, which it is and will continue to be. Out of the literally hundreds of messages posted here in a day there is a very small number that represent some type of problem that sysops need to deal with.

The problem messages stand out because they are loaded with emotion and fire, the technical threads don't stand out because they are expected. Take any day's messages and count the technically valuable ones from the firey ones and you will see that the ratio is very much loaded to the technical messages.