That possibility amuses me & I'm not even a fan of Star Trek.
b) This was already a part of the rules, effectively. The original don't be a dick rule was ambiguous enough that nearly anything someone disliked could be construed as an offence.
I guess that is kind of true. I don't know, it's been a while.
c) On that note: if you can't trust the moderators to behave reasonably, the text of the rules is no safeguard. An admin can choose to entirely disregard the rules as written at any point anyway, and you can't really appeal to the Supreme Court on the matter.
Well, yeah.
It's not so much that I expect you guys to willfully abuse anything, I just ideologically oppose certain rules. This is mainly when I think that the problems outweigh the benefits, & I don't see the need to go there in the first place. I also think that less is usually more.
As for fairness in enforcement, yes, it's a concern. All I can say is, if you think the rules are being inconsistently applied yell in my general direction and try to provide examples.
I guess that really is all that can be done.
And finally, I believe the alternative is worse. There's simply far too many ways to be an asshole to even begin to cover them in the rules, and if I did the resulting document would be a thousand pages long and nobody would read it. Refusing to act because one asshole in particular wasn't covered, or treating different situations the same way because it's in the text of the rules and we didn't factor in relevant context, will be worse.
As long as people get fair warning, I guess I don't really see it as an issue.
At the same time, we also need to clarify that trolling can be worthy of a ban in itself without consideration for further rules.
This is one of those things I'm ideologically opposed to. If a troll is disruptive enough to ban, it's very unlikely that they aren't breaking any rules. Even with as few rules as Not-FSTDT has. I think "troll" works best as a descriptive label, kind of like "asshat" or "douchebag." It's just not the same as "don't spam" or "don't post porn," or even as "don't necropost" or "don't backseat mod," which can all be more-or-less clearly demonstrated.
That, and having someone else to rage at can be a decent way to distract people from internal drama.
I'd call that a form of drama. I think that, if it is aimed at the board in general, it pretty much falls under "don't backseat mod." My problem is mostly with the designation/labeling. "Chewtoys" never really went anywhere, you bring up the example of Atheism Exposed, we just stopped referring to them as such. And I think that, in doing so, we kept our smarmy attitudes, but lost some of our mob mentality.
Speaking of "don't backseat mod," I was wondering where that leaves the whole "you are a bad member & you should not be here" type statements?
The year period seemed superfluous. If I recall correctly, the only person ever to make it to 'year' without getting permabanned for some other reason was Skyfire, and he didn't bother to come back after his time was up. Since the week/month/perma pattern is intended to be a basic guideline to base the duration of bans on, it should be based on what has actually worked in the past. So far, year has been functionally identical to perma, so I scrapped it.
The possibility for bans longer than a month remains, if we think it might help.
Makes sense.