If we're going to have an actual discussion about this, here are my thoughts. Feel free to tear into me.

The mods enforce rules which enforce certain norms regarding foul and inappropriate language, name-calling, sock puppetry, and the like. But there seems no way to reliably enforce the forum guideline that I posted above, in post #8, which recommends that people post intelligent and meaningful information. At least, the mods seem to do nothing about it. (Though they might send private messages to some posters; I don't know.)

I think most people on bf are actually pretty tolerant of newbies who ask for advice on chain lube and whether disc brakes are superior to rim brakes. Sure, there might be a few tongue-in-cheek posts ("Oh, no, not another chain lube thread!"), but I don't see rudeness very often. And I think most bf'ers are pretty tolerant of people who make mistakes -- say, people who post verifiable info that turns out to be incorrect; it helps if the person acknowledges the error -- but with this being the internet, that happens rarely.

However, I think that most of us have our limits, and some posters really push against those limits: people who repeatedly post information that is off-topic and even inaccurate, who post topics to the wrong forums, who derail threads. People who feel compelled to tell others how they should ride, what types of machines they should ride, how they should fit, etc -- especially when such "advice" was never requested in the first place. That is NOT being "nice" -- it is presumptuous, haughty, and potentially harmful to forumers who don't yet know how to separate good info from nonsense. And it often violates the guideline referenced above, which recommends that we post intelligently and meaningfully.

When a poster repeatedly, chronically, violates that guideline, some other posters are bound to act as many would in "real life": by telling the insulting time-waster to stop wasting time. And in response to the suggestion that we can all just skip the posts and threads that we find stupid: how do we know they are stupid until we have already wasted our time on them?