I've never been the type to fire people before giving them every opportunity to improve. Closing this thread without laying down some warnings or infractions will only lead to a similar thread started tomorrow and the day after that one gets closed. Some people just don't know any other way except being punished but as a whole, we have some members with good insight. Even if we don't agree with them sometimes. <snipped>
I'm all ears for suggestions.
Sorry for only getting back to this now. I had discussed this with Stephen and forgot this was pending here.
Finding a canned message that we could copy/past into threads where negativity and arguing is getting out of hand probably isn't realistic. At least I haven't yet found something that is always appropriate. However, I do think I've identified a general approach we could take when confronted with such threads.
The basic idea is to give people the freedom to criticize WP/WM as much as they want, but not other members, while widening the definition of what "criticism against members" means. This includes things we traditionally wouldn't infract for, in particular insults like:
"whiner"
"******"
"if you're someone who doesn't like change..."
"if you don't like it... just leave"
"hater"
Based on my analysis, those comparatively mild insults (and others like it) were the root causes for almost all the bad blood and endless arguing we encountered around the time of Dan's "is the fan community imploding" article. Threatening to infract such insults quickly took the steam out of those threads. The reason being that insults like "whiner", "******" or "hater" imply one side has views that shouldn't be taken seriously, which always put that side into a position of having to explain their views over and over again, resulting in somewhat of a vicious cycle, that the thread couldn't break out of.
This was one of the threads where I experimented with that approach. Both of the following posts are important, as they highlight the issue from both sides of the argument. As you can see, the thread basically ended at that point, without having to close it:
http://forums.windowscentral.com/windows-10-mobile/382182-3.htm#post3237121
http://forums.windowscentral.com/windows-10-mobile/382182-3.htm#post3239089
We still have these kinds of insults being thrown around on a regular bases, and it doesn't look like infracting them will become general policy, but it may be a good tool to have for clamping down on specific threads where arguments and negativity get out of hand.
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