The Posting Guidelines are there for everyone's benefit - the poster and potential readers.
The "infraction" system is to remind people of the the rules.
The vast majority of infractions are straightforward - "don't use bad language" "don't bump posts - it's rude" -" don't take threads off topic" . They don't incur penalty points and they are not a problem unless they are repeated.
The vast majority of people who get them either don't respond, or simply apologise and post again without the offending comment.
A small few take personal offence that we have the cheek to impinge on their right to free speech and think that the moderators should enter into long correspondence on whether "****" is really bad language or just a term of endearment from old English.
I certainly am direct. I don't really think that I should write long essays to people explaining why their posts are in breach of the Posting Guidelines. I prefer to be writing long posts helping people to solve their financial problems. And yes, I resent people who bump posts. It's not a hanging offence. It doesn't incur penalty points even. But the poster is not allowed post on that topic again which seems to be to be appropriate.
I won't use the word "rude" again in such warnings as maybe it's rude to describe someone else as rude.
Has anyone any links to other posts where posters are condescending, other than
1) please adhere to the posting guidelines
2) Please don't promote illegality on askaboutmoney?
I would consider a condescending post to be something like the following:
"that is a really stupid question. Where have you been all these years? Did you not know that you are supposed to pay your mortgage repayments on time?"
I can't really think of an example of this apart from my frustration yesterday with Joe Ballantine's and Complainer's failure to understand the
takeover of Superquinn.
A few have been reported as "abuse of another poster" and if they amounted to abuse, they were deleted.
We have deleted some "elitist" references to misspellings, but they are very rare. Some moderators have spent a huge amount of time rewriting long posts where the poster was in a very difficult position, but had written a very garbled message with no punctuation or sentences or order in the post.
Occasionally when two long-term posters get into a real ding-dong one makes a condescending remark to the other but, in my opinion, such remarks reflect only on the person making the remark.
But anyway, any examples of condescending posts?