Thomas Dalton wrote:
I know that the list admins have been criticized of late for letting through messages that people have questioned. However, this list is the forum of last resort for people who have been banned from post to Wikipedia.
It rarely does any good, though. It would be better if they emailed the admin in question, or ArbCom.
A common element in the complaints is that the admin in question does not respond to questions.
I'm one of those who see very little harm in letting through a hostile message. No one is forced to read the message.
There is no way to know if you want to read a message before you've read it, so you are forcing people to either read the message or not read the list at all. (You could read all the messages that don't mention admin abuse in the subject line, I suppose, but that would still result in you not reading perfectly good messages about admin abuse.)
You're just urging this false choice to be dramatic. It doesn't take much effort to look at the beginning of a message and decide that you don't want to read it. At that point it's easy to delete it and anything else in that thread. At least Mark was gracious enough to outline his dilemma. I am more worried by where others could take this in the future than about what will happen with this individual.
Ec