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Thank you for taking the time to write this. I won't address every point, partly because it's 1am here and partly because I know Mod Yellow has sent you a comprehensive reply already, which the mod team as a whole broadly agrees with.
Come November, it will have been 8 years since I took over this forum after a protracted and far-too-public argument with my predecessor about how he was running the place. For various reasons I'll leave it at that, but since dealing with the fallout of the change of power, Sunday was probably the most stressful day I've had on this forum, and that includes having to fire mods for abuses of power, and at one point arbitrate when real-world violence was threatened by one user against another.
I say this not because the consequences were particularly steep - at worst, we'd have been rushing to fix things after our delayed reaction early in the thread - but because this is probably the easiest situation to get wrong. Threats of violence, abuse of power, both have pretty black and white solutions. Islamophobia, while in flagrant breach of our rules and obviously not something we either want on this forum nor condone, is far more difficult to manage.
The mod team wasn't always in agreement on Sunday. As soon as I saw Todd's first post, and taking his history into consideration, my instant reaction for the good of the forum was to ban him and remove his post. However, I was talked out of it by some of my colleagues and on reflection I completely agree with them. Almost every post that addressed Todd, no matter how open they were to allowing him to air his views, made it clear that he was in a minority, and that the vast majority of the forum was more open-minded, more tolerant, and, frankly, has exactly the welcoming, inviting atmosphere that I wanted to establish back in 2011.
But it also meant that we didn't make Todd a martyr to his own cause, as Mod Yellow (I think? Might have been Aqua? It was a long day, sorry!) pointed out to me. So we elected not to censor it. I know dpastern and JN23 in particular raised concerns at our inaction - and rightly so - but aside from them each sending me a PM, there was no formal report of any posts in the thread, so we let everyone else keep tearing Todd apart. Special mention there to AlienTurnedHuman, who put together a meticulous takedown, and I'm sorry I had to edit out parts of Todd's comment, but I'll explain why shortly. It did hurt to dismantle such a well-crafted post!
As many of you no doubt saw, we left the posts up for a few hours before suddenly appearing to flip a switch and employ a less laid back approach. The reason for that had nothing to do with the above arguments for or against leaving the post in situ. On re-reading the thread, mostly to take the time to enjoy the counter-arguments, I noticed that parts of Todd's post were libellous. At that point it ceased being a free speech/bigotry/odd perspectives issue, and became a legal one. At that point we had no choice but to remove the posts, and taking again Todd's history into account, a ban had to follow.
We don't ban users lightly. I can count on one hand the number of users we've booted out permanently this year. There's a been a few holidays handed out too, but the only permanent bans recently were Todd, and a case of sustained transphobia which was an issue for two reasons: the user had a wider reputation for being rude to fellow users, and was making their anti-women stance (of which the aforementioned transphobia was the latest twist) increasingly overt; and the fact that a lot of our membership is female (including one openly transgender user) and we didn't want to allow one user to make many others feel less welcome here. I trust that most of our existing users were taking such posts with a pinch of salt, and in some cases fighting back, but we're not going to attract as broad an array of new users with such posts being freely allowed. In the end, while we do allow free speech and largely trust you all to be self-moderating, there is a limit to what we'll allow.
To end on a positive note though, it is wonderful to see how little moderation work there really is to do. The entire mod team are volunteers, and they all do an amazing job. It's great that they don't have to spend all their free time on the forum just to keep on top of trolls and the like, and I'd never expect them to put in those hours. This is the only forum I'm a part of where that seems to be respected.
Planet-F1 is the only place I've seen American gun violence issues discussed without anyone losing their temper and hurling abuse around. It's the only forum I've seen female racing drivers given serious discussion. It's the only forum where there's no hard and fast rules about what can and can't be put into what sort of thread. And it's this general maturity that lets us give you all a lot more freedom than most forums are comfortable with.
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