I’ve had a lot of back and forth with the mods here and site owners regarding the ‘despairful consultation’ thread and OP.
Discussion has been shut down on this.
Instead I and others have been accused of ‘insulting and hectoring’ the OP. Our posts have been summarily edited and deleted.
Meanwhile the OP hasn’t been able to back up his/her incredible story with one credible detail so far.
So is the lesson here that some have freer range than the regular contributors who come on this site with useful and verifiable content?
And what about implications of allowing people to freely spin tales of abuse on this? Surely it makes ALL posters and thread more suspect and thus the information shared here less credible when ‘anything goes’.
Anything goes except legitimate discussion as to the veracity of a posters fantastic claims!
Please keep the discussion focused on the general issue, and not on any particular poster or thread, thanks.
In general, while we do allow respectful questions, as can be seen in threads, we don’t allow repeated interrogation of people or aspersions to be made about them, and that will generally lead to posts being removed and threads being locked, even in Temp. I wouldn’t characterize such posting as “discussion”.
Direct reference to a specific post or series of posts still constitutes discussion of “the post and not the poster”, so why is it automatically verboten??
We don’t claim to be able to verify people’s claims. People are allowed to post questions here unless they are determined to be breaking our site rules. This is a determination made by site mods, and we have removed many posts for such reasons in the past. We do allow respectful questioning of people, but not continual hectoring of them or interrogation in an attempt to disprove what they’re saying.
I agree with @tempogain. We really can’t verify people’s claims, if something seems to not add up, question it and make your case. Not continuing to heckle with the OP about details, thats just a waste of time.
Another reason I see why sometimes not all claims add up. This is posted in public, so it’s not unreasonable to think an OP will ask a question omitting details or changing something in the story so it doesn’t put too much personal information out there.
I think this is the main point, if a bogus story is posted, and hordes of readers take it at face value and offer their concern and assistance, it hardly seems fair.
People roll up to the site unawares and they take it at face value, get all worked up, feeling sorry for them, wastes their time and leaves a bad taste in their mouth when they find out they’ve been had.
Even a small attempt at weeding out the trolls is SOMETHING.
Otherwise you are just click bait.
I can tell you that won’t work to grow this site.
It’s been tried.
It won’t work.
Honestly, unless a person is personally attacking me, using personal info I shared in the past to attack me or something along that nature. I don’t see the big fuss about it. If you think it’s fake, just say something seems off and leave it alone.
It also bring me back to the original point that sometimes a story may seem to have holes in it because the OP is trying to give out as much info as possible for a question without giving out too much info. That could mean omitting something to changing something in the details.
Although this forum is surely helpful, I have my doubts about the moderation as well…I placed my first post here not so long ago and right away a moderator felt the need to edit the title and add a poll…I don’t doubt the good intentions but if. I had wanted a poll I would have included it myself…really not sure why it was necessary to begin with. A comment with suggestion would have done .
I find myself agreeing with what you say in this post, but I do not connect it with having to harass the OP just because the OP’s backstory doesn’t fully satisfy your BS-detector.
In the topic that precipitated this discussion, I was instantly suspicious about whether the OP’s story was real. And i thought it was cool that some of the initial posts still offered to give advice – and even cooler that these posts were qualified by statements like, “I don’t know if the OP’s story is real, but anyway, maybe this will be helpful…” Helpful for whom? Not the OP, necessarily, but for anyone with who might face an odd situation in Taiwan albeit not as fantastical as the OP’s. And that’s a discussion.
What you have done is make potshots in OTHER topics about the decisions the moderators have done on the original topic.
People roll up to this site unawares…
It seems reasonable to expect that most people who roll up to this site do so with a healthy amount of skepticism. I do and I expect you do, too. At the end of the day, this is advice from complete strangers on the Internet. And despite that all kinds of coolness has happened thanks to the people we “meet” and converse with on the forums anyway.
Bottom line: do not believe everything you read on the Internet – including Forumosa! (If it makes you happy, I will make that into a t-shirt and give it away at our next happy hour)
In case there IS anyone on here who believes everything they read on the Internet, let me know and I’ll be happy to copy you into the CCs for my sister’s non-stop cat story email and Angel chain letter spam. Remember, if you break the chain, you’ll suffer horribly!