Silent Dave

Here's an alternative: don't restrict Dave's activities on IIDB, but set up the afdave Questions Thread anyway, stickied, as I described above (with just afdave and a couple others being able to post there). The moderators could then keep his posts in other threads intact, but add to each of his posts a message to this effect:

ATTENTION: This post has been flagged as a derailment attempt. afdave has a number of outstanding questions in the afdave Questions Thread, which he has yet to address, and which this post does not address. We encourage all IIDB users to refrain from responding to this post until it has been either de-flagged or moved to the Questions Thread. Thank you.

Silent Dave

Bump again, because I really think this idea should be seriously considered, or refined so as to allow for a way to finally pin Dave down about the questions he has dodged for over a year, without censoring him unnecessarily.

Julian

[MOD]
No matter what you may think of afdave and his answers (whether forthcoming or not) we do not call out individual posters nor do we make sticky threads for such purposes. Not all posts will live up to everybody's standards and we are not here to fix such problems in a direct manner although one may hope that all are enriched intellectually by our exchanges. We are here for the exchange of ideas and thoughts to the best ability of each and every individual poster. If you are not happy with their ability, insgihts, presentations, whatever, then you may critique their posts, ignore them, or otherwise undermine their material as long as you do not attack the poster himself (or herself). Frankly, I would have expected better of people here. You should know your logical fallacies. Which one have you committed here? This thread will be relegated to ~Elsewhere~ where it will find an unmourned demise.

Julian
Moderator BC&H
[/MOD]

Silent Dave

I have committed no fallacy. I do think that Dave's arguments suck, and my opinion of Dave himself is scarcely better, but I do not claim that the former follows from the latter -- rather that he dodges the questions he cannot answer whenever and however it suits his purpose, and in such a way that the uninitiated reader may be unfairly misled into believing that it boils down to a case of "he said, she said," the creationists' word against the realists'.

And yes we do call out individual posters; it's done all the time, particularly (though by no means exclusively) in the FDD fora. What we have not done is taken moderator action that responds appropriately to the aforementioned behavior. I'm proposing we do so, in a manner that simultaneously preserves Dave's ability to voice his ideas on IIDB -- I'm only saying he should be compelled to do so in a systematic and germane manner.

Please return this thread to BC&H, as it bears directly upon ongoing discussion in that forum; if the moderators and administrators object to my proposal as it stands, I can alter it as appropriate. Alternately, you could move it to QP&C.

Toto

It does not belong to BCH. It might go to QPC if you had a practical suggestion that does not involve lots of extra works for moderators, which I don't see.

Silent Dave

I must confess I don't have a good answer to that -- I hadn't anticipated moderator laziness as an objection. Very well, this thread may die.

Jesus Tap-Dancin' Christ

I have a much more effective solution, and it requires no effort on anyone's part save a single, 5-second, investment of time:

It's called the Ignore User feature. Put him on there, and stop reading his threads. Any derails to other threads will be dealt with by the moderators in the course of their duties, and you won't even be able to see his posts at all.

That's how I handle my intractable problems, and I'm sure it has prevented ulcers at 24 (though I have a few gray hairs, thank you US Army).

Toto

Dude - it's a question of effort versus effectiveness. Is afdave the center of existence? He might want to think so, but he's just one in a long string of people with unsupportable ideas who has come through here. Eventually he will get tired and go away. But it's never a good use of our time to try to micromanage discussions.

Chuck Rightmire

If you really want to deal with AFDave, the easiest way is to ignore anything he posts. He doesn't want comments or debate anyway. Then they will go away rather than last 200.5 pages.

Protinus

this is hilarious....I'm glad you guys "elsewhere" things for us bottom feeders!