TIL there’s a VHS emoji. Or is it Betamax? 
And thank you @Lesley for some clarification on these rules.
Mods, you guys rock. It’s incredibly difficult work moderating an active community like this. Thank you for giving your time and energy and sanity to this community.
Charming?
I prefer it to petitioning a moderator to “Do something!” The main drawback of the mute/ignore function is that if the muted person is maltreating someone I like, I won’t know about it and I won’t be able to stand up for the person who’s been targeted.
I’ve used it all of twice in year here. Besides the one you mentioned, another issue I have is that you can still get most of what that user has said in posts based on inference and other user’s responses. That doesn’t make them or their words go away.
I’m all about dancing, feeling good and moving.
Who knew Ned Flanders was a DJ? 
Yeah. No system is perfect. The other problem I just thought of as that someone who’s thinking about joining the space can see all that. If they feel that no one is calling out or dealing with trolly b.s., they’ll think twice about signing up here.
But I don’t want to spend all day asking mods for help, or get mistaken for a “harasser” myself. Nor do I want to feed trolls or try and reason with them. That trick never works, Bullwinkle. And it’s a huge drain on my energy. 
I must have missed a troll incident, or, more likely, just wandered off in search of coffee and smart@$$ery elsewhere.
THANK YOU MODS! is the only thing that needs to be said here.
that is all.
I apologize if this is your takeaway to the above. I am actually trying to say that every member here is responsible for creating the community they want to see – which means each member is empowered to speak directly to anyone who is crossing a line, and asking them to stop. Mods are not the only people who can speak up; they have a few more tools at their disposal when needed, which is why I said it’s worth escalating an issue to them if you think a thread should be closed, etc. But you don’t have to wait for a mod to tell a member that they’re causing a disruption.
The mods were never supposed to be a police force; they are facilitators. Discourse has designed the role this way on purpose. Clearly this point has been lost somewhere so I’m going to be working on clarifying it going forward.
What about good-natured brawling?
Try not to hurt anyone.
I’d flag this for being disrespectful towards our amazing human mods, but I don’t want anyone, including our human mods, to think that I’m making light of the situation or making fun of the rules…
Frak. You found a loophole.
/me Shakes fist at screen
SMFH.
Sigh
Yup
Yup
Thank you for putting it into words better than I could.
This is a curious choice of words. It implies that the harrassment mentioned in the original post needs scare quotes, which suggests that it’s not real. You have no way of knowing the extent of harrassment that may have occurred, or when, or in relation to what, so I’m wondering why you would make this suggestion.
Re: asking for help, I will have another post coming up that explains the purpose and use of the flagging system. For example, I only recently became aware of some CLEARLY line-crossing posts that have been on the forums for months, because no one bothered to flag them. Only admins can address flagged posts – moderators can flag things with a higher priority, but cannot make decisions on what happens to flagged posts. I am hopeful that a better explanation of how to use the flags effectively will help better address problematic posts, as well as make it easier for me to track members who are consistently pot-stirring and transgressing boundaries.
DM sent.
I think CLANG_Potroast used those quotes to indicate labeling. Like you might label me “Overdubs Guy.” (Not that I want to speak for others, but that’s how I read the post.)
I had a LOT else written, but I’m a big sucker for just getting to the root of a problem and solving the damn thing, so I’m trashing it.
THIS is the crux of the problem at hand, to be honest. It’s not that we, as users, are trying to fight the “no politics” rule. It’s that the moderators are actually policing the forums and closing threads or flagging comments hours and hours after the conversation has peacefully moved on, without any users flagging anything. Additionally, this policing is actually very biased in that certain areas of politics receive much much more strict policing by the mods but other politics do not get the same response.
It is worth reviewing whether moderators were actively engaged in these conversations or not, and if they are policing other discussions with less blatant line-crossing. This is truly an enormous cause for concern for me given some of my personal experiences on this and other platforms.
Do we have an estimated timeline on when users should expect a response to address an inquiry? I’m just trying to get a timeline for when to bring it up in DMs again so I’m not nagging about the one I submitted.
The system works!
Thank you for this alternate read! You may be right. These internets and their failure to convey tone and all.