In reply to Otto.

Peter, you wrote a 2200 word manifesto. In the shorter version you attempted to write later, you titled the review "A steaming pile of"...

Sorry, but if you're going to act out that sort of toxic, then you're going to be called out on it. In this case, you pretty literally shat on the 2nd try there.

Let me give you an example of the kind of person that the mods are dealing with here.

Couple weeks ago, I got an email from an aggrieved reviewer. He basically asked "Can you explain this?" In this case "this" was his account being flagged. I looked into it, as I always do, and he was flagged because he wrote a response in somebody's unrelated thread of "Gee, a year and still no one bothered to answer this. Wow." Note that he was just flagged for review. Nothing else. Not blocked, not banned, just marked as somebody to be watched in case he went off on a tear. Which, of course, he proceeded to do moments later.

He went on to rant about free speech, called people "sniveling cowards", and then sent me a wonderfully long ranty set of emails about Gutenberg (which was not at all related to any of his forum postings) and called me, quote, "a pathetic cowardly pussified corporate whore". That one was pretty good, actually. I respect that. Despite not being "corporate" in the slightest, to me, that really shows off what he thinks, and I appreciate that kind of verbosity.

Nevertheless, I didn't ban the guy. Because what he emails me, hell, I get that twice a week and usually once for breakfast, but still, he emailed me about it instead of ranting on the forums about his personal problems.

The view I have is that I don't really care what you call me. I'm hard; I can take it. But our volunteer moderators do their damnest to keep that kind of crap off the forums, and when they are clearly doing their job by preventing rants and toxicity, then I will back them every single time. They're not paid to do this, and they do *great* at it.

If they do wrong, and they do (they're human), then I correct them and move on. Everybody makes mistakes. I correct those mistakes, and let them know why and how to improve in the future. Somebody emailing me and being ranty means that something went wrong, so yes, I correct it. But what I think it correct and what the ranty person thinks is correct ain't always the same. This is indeed a community, and if somebody is being a jerk, then they get shown the door. That's how it is.

Now, yes, sometimes I am sarcastic. My humor doesn't always come through text. My bad, and I admit that it is something of a character flaw. But nevertheless, my goal is always the same: I try to help people. You can point to the time where I once gave somebody a bit of a hard time, but you can just as easily point to the time like 10 years ago where I was a complete dick to somebody. These are all me. I own them, and I have apologized when I was wrong or even just being too harsh. Text is not an emotive medium, and I've always had issues with it. Nevertheless, I own my mistakes. But my mistakes are not an excuse for others to act out, because again, we are human, and we are not perfect.