Moderation is necessary to keep the site on track and noise to a minimum, but not all noise is worthy of an infraction. Infractions are offensive to the person receiving it and often discourages future interaction in threads. Sometimes simply removing the post in question and sending a PM to explain why would be sufficient IMHO.
This is something that I really don't understand, and I don't mean that to sound disparaging or otherwise facetious. Granted, I do have a bias, since I am often required to be on the other side of the fence. An infraction is simply nothing more than a notice that a rule was violated, so it shouldn't be offensive.
The infractions are always worded cordially and professionally; there are no residual consequences unless a user did something so severe that s/he has to be banned outright on the first offense, which is quite rare. In most cases the infractions are worth a few points and expire within a week or two, and, so as long as there are no further accumulation of points, no one has any restricted posting rights or otherwise has anything to lose. Infractions are not fines, they do not require a court appearance, nor are there absolutely any real world consequences whatsoever. As I previously noted, they are not even an automatic ban unless the offense was quite severe, as the overall goal is just to cordially let someone know that a) there post wasn't congruous with the rules and b) that, in the future, the staff would appreciate cooperation in that regard to help the site run smoothly for the benefit of both the poster and the rest of the e-community.
Regarding veteran storm chasers being run off by overzealous moderation, that certainly was the case in a
few circumstances where someone took something too personal, though speaking entirely in an anecdotal manner without going back and doing some sort of a qualitative analysis on each and every infraction, the long-time veteran members are historically not the ones who generally run afoul of rules in the Target Area or elsewhere, as newer members with a year or less of posting history have historically tended to have a far higher tendency to post in a manner inconsistent with the forum posting norms. There are exceptions, but that tends to be the pattern. To some extent that is to be expected, as learning something as simple as the culture and norms of a small online message board is a gradual process that will take some time to fully internalize, and the staff has always tried to work with everyone in a fair and reasonable manner to bring posting within compliance of the site rules so that everyone benefits from a higher signal-to-noise ratio.
With all of that having been said, there are just some cases where a rule violation is extremely blatant and the staff is as professional and courteous as possible, yet someone inevitably takes it very personally.
