Dies to Removal

WHOSE GIMMICKS IS THIS AND WHY WAS IT NEVER USED

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Let me tell you something about spammers:

Spammers clog internet bandwidth, email inboxes, forums and blog comments. Over 90% of the world's email traffic is spam. Spammers have made email almost useless. Without filtering, spammers make forums and blogs basically useless.

Spammers cause actual monetary losses to people. For example when I was working at the university here, the admins told me that during the history of the school they had had to upgrade the school's email server several times solely because of spam. At times the server gets tens of spam emails per second, which effectively constitutes pretty much a DDoS attack (even though it's not a deliberate attack aimed precisely at that server in question). Since email is crucial for the university, they have no other option than to upgrade the server to handle all that incoming junk (or else genuine email may be lost). This costs money. Money that could well be used for something more constructive.

Spamming is illegal in many countries. In other words, not only are spammers scum, they are in fact criminal scum. I loathe spammers.

Whenever you call me a spammer, you could just as well be calling me a thief or a rapist. I find it obnoxious and offensive. When you happen to be on a bad mood and pick out one comment of mine out of hundreds similar comments and label it "spam" and give me an infraction for "spamming", you are bunching me with the criminal scum, the bottom-feeders of the internet.

I don't care what your forum rules define "spam" as meaning, making an innocent off-topic remark on a MtG card, or correcting someones mistake, is not spam. If you don't know what "spam" means, then go and find out, and fix your definition. Please stop insulting people. Reserve the term for actual spam (which does happen in this website), for the actual criminal scum. Stop calling me a criminal scum for basically any "infraction".

And since I'm on that subject, I'm really getting tired of the pretty arbitrary rules for calling people spammers here. For example, I see people making incorrect statements in the rulings sub-forum all the time, and other people correcting those incorrect statements all the time. It makes sense: People make mistakes, and other people correct those mistakes so as to not spread false information. But if a moderator arbitrarily thinks that some correction was "too narrow", he can decide to give an infraction for "spamming". What "too narrow" and "too nitpicky" really means, where the line really is, is anybody's guess.

The reasons given for infractions are also sometimes really bizarre. For example, I once corrected an incorrect statement made by someone, and gave a card as a counter-example. A mod decided to call me a spammer for that, and gave me this reasoning:

"If you have to pull out a card nobody asked about in order to disagree with someone's answer, chances are you're nitpicking."

Apparently if you show a counter-example with an actual card, "chances are you're nitpicking". The logic of this reasoning escapes me. (Even if you argue that the comment was "nitpicking", what does using a card have anything to do with that?)

Or how about this: I once was browsing the forums and I thought I was in the "general" subforum and posted this comment to a thread: "I love the flavor. The fire burns you, and unless you put it out with some water, it will burn you again." (I don't remember what the card in question was.)

It turns out that I didn't notice that the thread was actually on the rulings forum. Oops. This was an honest mistake. Well, it was a rather innocent and innocuous remark, so no harm done, right? Wrong! I got once again labeled as a spammer for the horrible, horrible crime of posting such a hideously offensive remark in the rulings forum. When I asked the moderator what harm did my comment make that deserved the infraction, I get this gem of a response:

"Everybody who read your post was hurt by it. They read your post, expecting an on-topic contribution, only to find that their time and mental energy was wasted by an off-topic post."

If I didn't know better, I would have thought that the mod was just busting my chops, making fun of me. No sane person would write that seriously. But apparently we are in bizarro-land here.

What is off-topic? Are there actually "topics"? If the conversation moves away from where it started to a different topic, isn't it "on-topic" except on a different one?

No, Stardust is right.

No, Stardust is right.

And I should know. I made it.

No, Stardust is right.

And I should know. I made it.

The plot thickens.