To piggyback on this as a permanent reminder:
I've tried to have patience with a lot of the non-sense on this forum, but there are now legitimate old time users that are being blantly disrespected and leaving the forum without any amount of instigation. In their place we have escalating arguments that pervade threads and dominate all discussion. While I didn't feel that having negative discussions in and of itself was frankly toxic, the actions of multiple members on this forum over the past week or two has convinced me to change my tune.
Here is a non-exclusive list of rules that will lead to escalating moderator action:
1. Doxxing of users will not be tolerated. Our field is small enough that posting multiple personal details about a person leads to obvious identification of that user. Previous users guilty of this have been warned.
If you Doxx a SDN user in this forum by posting 1) their name, 2) where they trained (specifically by institution), 3) where they work now (location), 4) other details that upon googling lead to obvious knowledge of who the user is (especially discussions of lawsuits, media coverage of the SDN user, etc., this is not an exhaustive list), you will get
ONE warning (at discretion of moderators), followed by a permanent Ban for the next offense. This warning will be at the discretion of moderators, and people who are overtly crossing the line will be banned directly.
There are a total of 2 users who were warned recently. In a previous incident a user was warned as well.
2. All interactions between SDN members are to remain professional. You are allowed to disagree with somebody. If you disagree with something that somebody said, you can say "I think what x said is incorrect, or an overexaggeration". You can't say "omg x is such an idiot what is wrong with you *****". You are not allowed to personally attack other SDN users. Calls for banning users will be met with escalating warnings and eventual ban. If you find yourself becoming agitated at another user in the forum and feel they have crossed the line, REPORT their post to the mods and we will handle it. People continuing to argue and bicker back and forth with escalating personal attacks will be getting warnings and eventual bans.
3. Keep threads on-topic. There are enough threads about the job market or rad bio/physics discussion. If you start posting the same crap in a thread that is not built to discuss it, posts will be deleted, warnings will be handed out, and we may end up banning disrespectful users.
If you feel insulted by a comment, report the post to a moderator. We will evaluate the situation. This is what
@Neuronix and I signed up for, but we can't be here 24/7. If you see something against ToS, REPORT it. Don't argue back and break ToS yourself because you retaliated. This will be like the NFL - if two players both throw punches, they are both gone.
This last bit is more of a request: please try to keep conspiracy theory discussion to a minimum. Unfounded discussion about the drivers of the issues at play here do not help our field. Rampant speculation about the motives of those who are not here to defend themselves is not valuable.
This is not, in anyway, to silence people that are critical of the field or the direction it's going in. To reiterate - the discussions about job market, radbio/physics boards, and the effects it may have on medical students are still allowed. You are allowed to have a negative view of the field and post on this forum - you just have to do it respectfully.
I'm open to suggestions, either in public or through PM, for ways that this forum could be improved, feel free to contact me directly.
There are multiple users that have received a warning in the past few weeks on this forum for personal attacks, doxxing, whatever. That group of people, please consider yourself on notice in the months going forward. If you continue to verbally attack other users or not be respectful to your colleagues (these are the same people you'll see at meetings!) in a field as small as this, then you will lose your privilege of posting on SDN.
tl; dr - Stop being mean to each other, use the report function more often, don't Doxx fellow sdn members.
