This might be cynical, but I'm not sure it's possible to have an online community that doesn't function this way, more or less. I think there's a general law o

This might be cynical, but I'm not sure it's possible to have an online community that doesn't function this way, more or less. I think there's a general law of online communities: so long as there are rules of any kind, there will always be users who push into the gray area (e.g. by finding ways to follow the letter but not the intent), and then keep pushing until stopped(). The moderator is then always left with the choice between punishing only the bad actors (which will be interpreted as selective enforcement or unfair targeting), or changing the rules to make things stricter for everyone (disallowing behavior that wasn't causing problems apart from the bad actors). () I read once in a parenting guide that children crave boundaries, and tend to escalate bad behavior until punishment occurs in order to establish where the boundaries are. Probably there's an analogy to be made there.