We do also hope that we won't have to follow through too often on striking for flames. Lantz has often been an exception in this forum, and between that and our notification that the staff are getting really fed up of personal attacks, we would like to imagine that situations of similar nastiness won't appear often and force us to go that far.
We are trying to be fair by putting everyone on notice that we're going to be examining flames particularly closely, and by reminding the forum that we don't just have a list of misdeeds and the punishments that fit them, to be robotically adhered to: the staff has always reserved the right to use their considered judgement to adjust to a given situation.
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This still requires an exercise of our own judgement. If we punished everyone who got reported every time they got reported, most of the forum would be banned.
(That said, we still prefer reports over nothing: the users have to help us keep an eye on a forum as busy and varied as this).