Originally posted by cgannon64
... maybe you should loosen up the agreement ...
Again you miss the point CG, but that may be by choice.
Antonius chose the path of denying me or TF the opportunity to acknowledge or reinforce the positive side of his behavior and instead went on drunken spree again just a week before someone would try to do exactly what you may have wanted us to do.
Letting Antonius go a month in private without doing anything stupid would not be an unreasonable request.
His choice to publish the restrictions here in this thread in order to draw attention to himself and then try to flaunt the restrictions or gain support from the peanut gallery had him on a collision course with destiny from almost the second he finished typing and pushed the submit button.
No one needed to know that Antonius was on probation or restriction and it would have been inappropriate to hold him up to public ridicule or to try to give him extrra sympathy or attention because he lost the privilege of making free choices with his avatar because he suffered a judgment lapse on April Fools day. One of the reasons that you do not see a public listing of individuals who get in trouble plus their offenses is because many of these individuals thrive on attention both negative and positive.
When someone chooses to make a public spectacle of themselves it is part of this manipulative, pseudotrolling, needy attention grabbing behavior that can be dealt with just as one would deal with an addiction to any other behavior or substance.
You also have to look at the restrictions on Antonius's use of title, avatar, and signature and see them for what they really are and were. The only issue involved in the process was how to get the point across to him that using these privileges for the purposes of trolling and creating controversy would be viewed as inappropriate. Agreeing not use these privileges for any non-standard use effectively got the point across and eliminated the risk of repeat behavior. Punishing him was never the intent beyond getting the behavior to stop. Even now punishing him is not the purpose beyond making it absolutely clear that when there are rules about trolling, avatrolling, leader bashing, and signature/title abuse then these rules apply the Sultan/Antonius just as they apply to others. Being the class avatar clown does not give you the get out-of-jail free card to do things that otherwise would get you banned.
If we could roll back the 8mm film of Antonius's life and let him reconsider the choices he has made in the past month, perhaps things would now be different.
I would reverse the focus of this discussion and ask why we seem to only see this sort of avatar taunting/avatar trolling only among a selected segment of the membersship population?? We see other members change and shift avatars but rarely do we see the dead-baby pictures or borderline image content and deliberately edited troll images except in certain areas. Is there somewhere that this is being learned or reinforced or is it just the result of immaculate conception where someone wakes up and says to themselves "Hey, lets see what sort of rise this little ditty will bring" instead of "How well will this image represent who I am today."
Help me to understand the though process here so that when the next Antonius example comes up, I will be better able to understand the appropriate mamangement reponse that should be applied to what I think was a fairly simple issue in this case.
