Why are people on message boards so NASTY?

If we mods were to respond to each name-calling we'd be doing it all day long and nothing else. My take on this is that people should be allowed to fight their own fights unless they clearly cross the line into gross violation of the Terms of Service. This, for people who get into a fight here and there and toss some name-calling during said fight but otherwise contribute to the discussion in other threads (remember, posting history is key). For those whose only purpose in being here is to insult everybody else and that's all they do, it's a different matter and warrants harsher action.

About your last paragraph: I think we aren't doing either one of these extremes. For example, we don't act at all on OT stuff. And it's not that people can say and do anything they want to, because we've banned a fair number of posters already. It happens that the settings in this forum software are such that their accounts remain, so people think they are still here, and the word "banned" is not displayed, but we've done some cleaning-up.