We have had enough of the personal jabs, name calling and the like.

Time outs have been issued today to a number of members who just cannot get this in their mind that that type of posting is uncalled for and will not be tolerated. More TO's will be given as necessary to keep things civil and keep our site one of the most popular available.

We all have a passion for our thoughts and for OUR team but;

1. Think before you post.
2. Post with the thought that a response will come back in the same flavor and rhetoric you initially present.

Larry, an extremely pleasant and polite guy, has unfortunately failed to get his message across. So please allow me to elaborate.

We moderators have handed out a total of about 6 months worth of time-outs in the last week. Not one single time out was due to the position being taken. Every time out was for calling names - other posters or Packers employees.

You will post here like a sober, mature adult, or you will read here without posting privileges.

All us moderators have run out of patience. We're deeply into the "Ready, Fire, Aim" version of moderating. You've now read warnings from Larry, Grabthar, and me. Maxman is not so loquacious, he just hands out (appropriate) time outs.

Another day, another suspension. This one was for 365 days. For referring to a certain highly-placed member of the Packers management team in terms of skin color and with innuendos of sexual preference. We don't care that he disagreed with Packers policy. We can how he wrote it.

OK, everybody, you have a rare opportunity here: you can learn how to disagree with people and yet show respect: "Well, sir, I have a different perspective." This is a great place to practice. Almost everyone posts anonymously, which means your drinking buddies will never know you're learning to be polite. It can be our little secret.

And yet another one week time out for referring to our new starting QB in sarcastic and demeaning terms after being warned.

We're very tired of the immature name calling, and we're all on a short fuse. Remember being a kid, and mom and dad were in a mood, and you spent the evening tip-toeing around the house? That wasn't fair then, and this isn't fair now. Too bad. Time for intelligent people to be tip-toeing around.

Two whole days without suspensions, but the trend dies today.

10 days to a second offender for calling anyone who doesn't agree with him a "dunce," and posting in language offensive to many of our members. As he's had a warning and this is his second time-out for a total of three moderator interactions, consideration is being given to, as we like to put it, "thinning the herd." At this instant, we have 2746 members and some huge number of unregistered guests that read but don't post. If we were to, say, drop this down from 2746 to 2700 and as a side effect lose all the people who can't get with the "PG-13 and treat others with respect" thing, we all think that would be good.

If we're aiming at Favre's continuous record, all I can say is we are now ahead of Rodgers.

Well, central time it's a new day, if perhaps not yet in my own Pacific time.

Today's action (so far, CST) is a member being permanently banned for homophobic and scatalogical language pertaining to, um, as near as I can tell, Favre, the Packers management, the Bucs, and me personally. I could be wrong about who it was aimed at, the sentence structure used was not that to which I am accustomed.

I like to think of my job here as chlorinating the gene pool. The herd is thinning.

Didn't work. It's morning now, and another guy is permanently banned. After a warning and two suspensions, called Thompson several names, recalled the Devine / dog episode (in my mind the most embarrassing thing ever done in Green Bay) and asked if Thompson had a dog, and said he could no longer be a Packers fan. Also predicted (correctly) he would be banned for his post. Who are we to disappoint him?

We moderators are now officially on the atkins diet, we've had nothing but protean for days. We've decided that in a perverse way we are enjoying the current Favre drama - it's bringing all the evil clowns out of the woodwork and making our job clear, if perhaps not exactly fun. Another week or two of this and we should have this board running really smoothly. Along this line, we're now officially asking everyone here who is not in control of their emotions when posting, or who likes to post when drunk, to please write whatever is on your mind about TT, MM, Favre, Bucs, whatever. Let's have a goal to clear this up by the 16th, the Packer 2nd pre-season game (I allow for Rodgers to have some consistency problems in his first game of the year, and then a few days for the trolls crawl out from under their dank and scummy bridges to call for Rodgers public evisceration).

I was just thinking of posting how we'd gone an entire day without a time-out. . . then we had a late entry.

30 day time-out, the 2nd in the last month for this guy, for hijacking a thread with the sole purpose of telling everyone ad nauseam that our starting QB sucks and the end of the world is nigh.

You know that guy that lives on the sidewalk downtown, always wears an army jacket, never bathes, drinks his lunch out of a paper bag, and accosts everyone who walks by? Well, I dunno, maybe he's an important and valued member of your community, but he and his intellectual kin are not welcome to post here.

--- late breaking news ---
we got an insulting PM from this guy, telling us he's right and we're stupid nazis. Upgraded his 30 day suspension to a permanent ban.

Five days, no timeouts or suspensions, one warning issued. Wow.

We got a note from a guy 7 months into a one year suspension asking to be reinstated. Helpful hint: want your sentence reduced? Time to be accountable (own your behavior) & apologetic.

Two weeks with nothing but a couple warnings. . . which I didn't think interesting enough to post about.

Today, a ban for a poster who chose to come here from a certain other board just to make trouble.

Well, after three relatively quiet months, things are heating up again. Due, no doubt, to our new losing streak.

Two time outs issued today, both for being rude to other posters. Two warnings issued to other posters, same reason. I also deleted about 20 posts in the last 24 hours.

We keep records of who gets warned. I issued a time out to a guy because he was previously warned in April by Kohler, and again in September by Maxman. If this doesn't get his attention, we'll likely encourage him to find somewhere else to post. We can be very encouraging.

And yesterday, a poster banned for 1) being rude to other posters, 2) being new, and 3) being intensely rude and obscene to moderators when warned. We now have 2760 2759 members here.

Perhaps it's not fair, but new posters are cut less slack. And being seriously rude to us, even in a PM, makes us believe you're never going to change.

Two time-outs issued today, for getting into a, um, "water-shooting" contest. One for 5 days, one for 30 days.

There's a thing I really dislike, which I think of as hijacking threads. You can tell when someone does it 'cause 1) about every third post is by one particular person, and 2) the thread turns into an argument about who said what, who's putting words into whose mouths, and the definition of words like "is" and "fact." We have a couple people here who do this a lot. No particular single post is a violation of our rules, but overall you get someone posting a couple dozen times a day with little purpose beyond to turn a discussion about the Packers into a discussion about this poster. We mods notice this and get seriously tired of it.

Time-out of indefinite duration issued today for getting into fights with three people in two days, two of them moderators. See paragraph immediately above: if I see a whole bunch of posts in a row, roughly every other post is by you and the others are about you, I conclude that 1) the conversation is not about the Packers in any meaningful way and 2) you are an immature proto-narcissist. In this case a time-out will be given until you manage to convince me that you are not in fact a narcissist. If you fall into this category, this should be fun for you as all subsequent PMs with me are all about you.

Delicious!!!! Mark, your wit is priceless.