Sulasailor: Those not prepared to retract their ill judged comments and apologise for their offence should be banned.

Could I ask the principles here to consider this and to add this rule to our 'unwritten' constitution.

Additionally can Agoracom clarify that its rules apply to PM as well as public posts.

Luckily we have such a clarification already in place. The preamble of the Agoracom Six Rules of Use states the following (highlighting by me):

"Participation on the AGORACOM website, which includes, but is not limited to, blogs, discussion forums, stock hubs, "private messaging" system, and any other electronic medium used for communication with others on AGORACOM, is a privilege and not a right. As such, all the aforementioned communication features are governed by the AGORACOM Six Rules of Use. Though we have used a lighter side in getting our point across, contravention of any of the following, on any of the aforementioned mediums, will lead to automatic termination of your AGORACOM membership."

So hub leaders can handle e.g. obvious insults and harassment immediately (rule 2). Violations in PMs would require the receipient to reveal the message(s) in question to a hub leader.

The term "ill judged comments" is more difficult, because a priori it is unclear or at least disputable what an ill judged comment is and what is not. Potentially each and every opinion could be an "ill judged comment", would pose the author at the risk of being banned, and thus would discourage opinions. And we don't want to do that, do we? Still this is not necessarily a problem, because we have rule 5 which forbids "repetition of the same question, fact or opinion over and over after a response has been provided or if there is currently no ascertainable answer."

According to this rule everyone could post his opinion, we would have a dispute over it, (possibly) rebut the opinion, and that's it. Only if someone comes up with the same argument over and over again, he would be banned.

However, I think even in the case of repetition hub leaders should keep some sense of proportion and not ban anyone, "because we have had this discussion already two years ago."