I did not wanted to post in this thread, but there's one thing I would like to reflect to.
Korona wrote:
Technical statements might be controversial but they should not be moderated. If I claim that 1+2=5, that's within my right. I am wrong but I should not punished for my ignorance. However, if I state "1+2=5 and the reason why you cannot believe this is that you are all pathetic apes", the latter part of that sentence certainly should be moderated.
In general I agree, however I also think that statements like "1+2=5" should not be allowed. Not a ban, but at least a moderator saying "fact check: fake" would be very much needed. Since moderators aren't doing this, it is left to the forum members to do the fact checks.
I think perceiving forum members doing the fact checks as aggressive or offensive
is the root of the problem, not that someone does the fact checks. If it were a moderator saying "fake", there would be no problem, everybody would accept that. But since it's another forum member with the same rights saying so, some might think he is asking for a flame war, when in reality he doesn't, he just said "fact check: fake" for all of us. I think we as a community should encourage fact checks for all of our sake and build some kind of etiquette on how to handle those in a civilized manner (by not thinking it's a personal attack for example).
(I'd like to point out while it's not perfect, but in general this community handles these things well. Yes, there are occassional confrontations, yes there are flame wars sometimes (we are only humans after all), but except a few cases those are mostly civilized technical debates as they should be. On OSDev there are already a lot fewer flame wars as on any other similar forums, maybe that's why when there is it makes the news.)
Cheers,
bzt