Urs Schreiber

Hi Urs,

the name of the "user who left" is Vladimir Kalitvianski and he never left the site for more than at most 2-3 days, despite my editing of some of his comments.

A user who did permanently leave the site because another user, who was at that time also an administrator, explicitely called him a moron repeatedly is Marco Frasca

http://www.physicsoverflow.org/user/JonLester

a former user of Theoretical Physics SE.

Here is an equal amount of genuine physics discussion: consider a lattice and allow two species of spinless fermions, the even species and the odd species, and allow them to hop on the even and odd sublattice. Introduce a mobility interaction between them, so that when a neighboring site is occupied by the opposite species, the hopping is enhanced for the other species. What is the superconducting ground state of this model?

Dear Urs,

The recent discussion regarding rudeness and edits is due to a case where a moderator unilaterally harassed a user of this site by editing their comments repeatedly, removing content and changing the meaning of these comments. The user left in frustration. This behavior occured while the rules explicitly stated that moderators are NOT allowed to do this. Imagine what will happen if you change the rules to say that moderators are allowed to do this.

The fact that rudeness is distracting and annoying doesn't mean that moderators need to enforce it. The voting system can do a good enough job of enforcing it by itself, without any imposition of power. Rude comments are nearly always off-topic and always more downvoted than they would be if they were polite. This automatically produces polite discussion without any imposition of power.

The exception is when a user has a minority opinion, and is contradicted and insulted often--- then you can sometime see hostility develop. In these circumstances, the moderators simply remove and block the user with the minority opinion, regardless of the tone of voice, just for being contrary. It is extremely important to never have rudeness rules for this reason. This was explicitly stated at the beginning of the site, repeated again and again, and yet, still, there was abuse of this nature even when it was explicitly against the rules. Please reconsider your opinion.

I will add that it is difficult to see what the abuse was if you look on meta. The precise pattern was editing out content from one user's comments, without editing out anyone else's until the user was harassed enough to leave in disgust. Please don't enable future moderator abuse, and protect people's rights. Remember, protecting the right to speak is not the same as encouraging rudeness.