Dixie is right. And anyone who can be proven to have assisted the asshole should be gone as well.
I am all for tolerance, but lines must be drawn concerning people's real lives.
Here is the thing about personal information and the people that violate it, most people, other than alias, usually aren't so stupid as to blatantly post shit out in the open that can easily be seen.
Historically on this site, a lot of it has been subtle stuff, that is usually hard to catch. it's usually been something like . . ." hey... how's bob doing." Most people in a thread will think nothing of a sentence like that, and move right on by. Does that count as personal information when it's a generic name and no one pays attention to it?
For a long time, we didn't really know how to approach that issue. It also didn't usually even come up.
What if, instead of the above being an innocent comment, it's something nefarious where the poster is actually saying "guess who just found out the name of your kid now?"
- or -
"So X, how was the snow?" - after maybe someone posted pictures on facebook about a winter ski vacation.
Note: the above are just examples, but very closely resemble 90% of the "personal information" that's on these boards.
So after a while we started realizing that people literally stalking others is a major problem, and we expanded the personal information rule to include "using personal information in order to intimidate and harass."
The intent was to punish those that have a habitual pattern of trying to intimidate another person.
But these creates new problems, because sometimes you'll have parties use these rules as a catch all gotcha technicality for something that just shouldn't be thought of as personal, in the true sense of the word, nor does it cause real harm.
"Hey man, how's life in texas?"
A statement like that is pretty vague, it's not localized, it's not really THAT personal.
As you can see, sometimes it's subjective, which is why it isn't always an easy decision.
Lastly, this is all very new to everyone on this board. For the longest time, the personal information rule never came up, and never was violated. It was like a rule that existed in theory, but no one would ever be so low as to violate it.
It can be a challenge when you want to be consistent in your application of rules while also trying to stick to the spirit of the rules.
Passing around peoples pictures, and linking to their facebooks, and talking about kids names, and showing that to other psychos on the internet is obviously something that could affect someone in real life. So we try to prevent that.
Saying "haha you have a dumb haircut" is a bit different.
But as to the obvious stuff, posting phone numbers, addresses, photos, where they work etc, makes it very easy to come to a decision.
I would'nt necessarily say I would go zero tolerance. We are all human, and capable of freaking the fuck out sometime. If someone was truly remorseful, apologetic, and had an otherwise good history here, I could see a reason to give that person a pass. If people have a history of being a dickhead, constantly abusive, and they post personal information, and they don't give a shit that they did it, they will probably be out the door the very first time.
