Please define "personal attacks"

[eyezberg]

[quote="WRobinson"]The GPL discussions are no longer going to be maintained under a closed reply system.  We encourage all to participate, however, we do insist on the following:

    * No Personal Attacks against anyone! ...[/quote]
As some time ago a post of mine, which imho did not contain any personal attack was deleted; as posts from other people with lots of personal attacks were not (can provide both), please clearly define what is considered here as a personal attack.. or does this have to be done by our friend" legal advice" too?

Thanks

(edited to add anticipating thanks)

[brad]

Moving to correct forum.

[brad]

Joe,
I sent you a message about that post, and offer to allow you to repost it, IF you would format it with punctuations and line spaces etc.. you chose not to.

I think that the moderators have shown EXTREME self control lately. Your choice to once again start complaining around here saddens me...

[eyezberg]

I posted this

Quote from: WRobinson
The GPL discussions are no longer going to be maintained under a closed reply system.  We encourage all to participate, however, we do insist on the following:

    * No Personal Attacks against anyone! ...
As some time ago a post of mine, which imho did not contain any personal attack was deleted; as posts from other people with lots of personal attacks were not (can provide both), please clearly define what is considered here as a personal attack.. or does this have to be done by our friend" legal advice" too?

Thanks

(edited to add anticipating thanks)

and it was deleted a few seconds later..

Is it too much to ask for? As the new rules clearly state if you do not comply you will get banned, I'd at least like to know what is liable to get someone banned here?
strange...

[brad]

Joe, you have got to be joking.. it was moved.. you received an email notifying you about it. I will now merge this one with that.

[eyezberg]

Brad, had I recieved a notification, I wouldn't have reposted.
After the repost disappearing, I wouldn't have put it up on my site.
When I move posts over at the french forums, I leave at least a one-day redirect, so the person knows what is going on...
These rules are specific to the GPL forums only afaik, so clarification would be more visible and usefull over there, than here.

I was not given the reasons  you put forward now as to why the other post you refer to was removed.
Please forward that text to me for editing.

It would've been better to explain what is included in personal attacks in the ban-threat entitled ruling for GPL forums, so people could maybe avoid bans, even if just due to diverse language understandings.

Haven't felt like joking around here for quite some time now, as you know...

A clarification would still be appreciated.

[Wendy]

A clarification would still be appreciated.

The following link best represents what we would consider a personal attack: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_attack

Generally, a personal attack is committed when a person substitutes abusive remarks for evidence when examining another person's claims or comments. It is considered a personal attack when a person starts referencing a supposed flaw or weakness in an individual's personality, beliefs, lifestyle, convictions or principles, and use it as a debate tactic or as a means of avoiding discussion of the relevance or truthfulness the person's statement. It works on the reasoning that, by discrediting the source of a logical argument, namely the person making it, the argument itself can be weakened.

This line of "reasoning" is fallacious because the attack is directed at the person making the claim and not the claim itself. The truth value of a claim is independent of the person making the claim. No matter how morally repugnant a person might be, he or she can still make true claims. For example, a defense attorney may claim that a witness' testimony cannot be trusted because he is a convicted felon. On the other hand, illuminating real character flaws and inconsistencies in the position of an opponent are a vital part of the public political process and of the adversarial judicial process. Use of a personal attack in a logical argument constitutes a formal fallacy called ad hominem, a term that comes from a Latin phrase meaning "toward the man".

For further reading, I recommend the Fallacy Files, specifically this: http://www.fallacyfiles.org/adhomine.html

The "subfallacies" are definitely of interest  to this topic for anyone seeking further clarification of the definition of Personal Attack. 

I cannot, and will not, guarantee that we're going to catch every personal attack.  I'm quite sure in the mess of everything that we have missed quite a few. There were periods of time in what I'll call "Round 2" (creating the original open reply sub boards in the Lounge) where the attacks were flying in faster than we could catch them.

I also will not guarantee that every moderator is going to interpret things the same way.  We do our best to communicate with each other before taking extreme actions.  We will continue to do our best, that's all I can guarantee. 

Given the amount of time this has gone on and the personal energy that's been expended on it, I think we've done pretty good as a team. 

You can help by reporting posts you consider to fall under any of the above.  We'll do our best to act on the reports as soon as reasonably possible.

And everyone can help by directing their focus on the issues being discussed, and not on personal issues or experience with the other individuals discussing them. 

Joe, I hope this helps.  If it does not, or if I have missed the issue somehow, please do let me know. 

edit: removed "in this" in paragraph 3 when "to this" was already stated.

[eyezberg]

Wendy, thanks loads, that's perfect. Maybe adding the link to the rules would help?
Only part I don't like too much in there is

t is considered a personal attack when a person starts referencing a supposed flaw or weakness in an individual's personality, beliefs, lifestyle, convictions or principles...

as this is why all these discussions are still going on and out of the way: it is believed here and people are convinced (some more, some less) that most extensions interacting with Joomla are derivates, while this is believed for some extensions which just use some Core functions to return values for them to use in further processing to be untrue by many 3PDs.. Opposite beliefs and convictions.. Well, I trust you'll continue to do a good job, and I'll continue to keep copies of all my posts
Thanks

PS: still not recieved any notification about the move of the posts, just for the record..

[infograf768]

Joel,

FYI. I do not know if it is the case for you but, lately, I got a lot of problems concerning notifications.
I traced that to my ISP. In my case it is orange, former wanadoo.
They have started a new automatic anti-spam central filtering beginning of July, and although it nicely gets rid of all the viagra stuff, it also took off many of the notifications I was supposed to receive, for unknown reasons.
By specifically permitting all mails from a said server to pass through, I managed to solve the issue.