Okay, let’s differentiate between ridiculing other people’s opinion and defeating it in a rational discussion, why not. And well, this behaviour may have been over the top (even though I though the first comment by Chansik was hilarious and quite to the point 
), but sure, hopefully we will be able to do better than that in the future 
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Under Buddha-Dhamma, that is possible:
Yes… a transgression overcame you in that you were so foolish, so muddle-headed, and so unskilled… But because you see your transgression as such and make amends in accordance with the Dhamma, we accept your confession. For it is a cause of growth in the Dhamma & Discipline of the noble ones when, seeing a transgression as such, one makes amends in accordance with the Dhamma and exercises restraint in the future."
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I’m mixed. I can see both @Gabriel_L’s and @Vstakan points. Personally the more discusions I read like this one @tommit started, the more I limit what I read on the forum, and I already do limit quite a bit. I don’t go to other internet forums or social media as I’m just not interested. And here my interest is certainly more what @Gabriel_L suggests:
That being said, I also know there are others who enjoy a wider range of topics and discussions.
Actually, I almost just stopped reading this discussion and certainly wasn’t going to comment until I saw @Cara’s post reaching out to see what others in the communnity think. I really appreciate you @Cara and the other moderators for your care in moderation and all you do!
So my two cents: Yes, I think it has an impact on people who are new to SC discourse (and/or on decisions some new people might make as to whether to get involved at all, especially as they maybe aren’t going to take the time to sift through everything and find those worth reading). In this case, the comment I think is very inappropriate and definitely against the guidelines is this one of @tommit’s:
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I really can’t comment on the post by @tommit because I have no idea what it means.
But in general, I prefer not to get into the business of deleting posts whenever somebody might be “triggered” by one. That’s a slippery slope. It’s pretty easy to ignore threads one doesn’t want to read.
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Not following closely, excuse me.
Explain this please. Company means the creators of “Discourse” on github.
If you mean COMPANY then that would be duly noted.
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The question is in the ability to understand or not the Dhamma, If you understand it you can fill in any discussion quotes and also explain them. The “sin” of my first intervention was to explain the Buddha’s use of the rice and the curd that he had to break the fast. It is obvious that the Buddha did not know about nutrition and many other things (he did not know how to read or write, let’s not forget) and it is clear that he did not know what is the use of tryptophan and its use in meditation jhanas. It is also clear that if we put the limit on unillustrated knowledge, the suttas will serve no purpose. And it will be what I put in my post: black dhamma.
The fastest and stupidest way to lose a game is to play against the referee.
I do not mind putting the date. And, by the way, I can not suffer. Do you suffer?
The problem here is that the player is trying to be a referee.
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While the tone has been a tad overly harsh here (the tendency on the internet for sila and right speech to go by the wayside), a point was made that has some validity, IMO, and which I’ve been searching for a skillful way to bring up here… somewhere…
Namely to question what balance is proper here between pariyatti (philology, if you will) and patipatti (or even pativedha)?
Several discussion have been hijacked into debates of philological minutiae, and even the opinion expressed that practice considerations (“personal” experience or anecdotal stuff) are irrelevant (dismissed out of hand). (I could cite instances, but rather keep it general.)
Does focus on EBT imply just textual-/context-critical, philological matters?
At times in such debates I’ve been tempted to bring up the issue of what the significance might be looking at word and grammatical interpretations in terms of the implication for meaning in practice. The tenor of discussion, however, suggests such would likely be not welcome.
Not to go down the slippery slope of proliferating personal experiences (there are dharma forums already for that), but to explore the balance of possible word interpretations against implications (and experienced realities) in the practice of the dhamma presumably intended to be communicated in the words.
I have once put up the question whether we should have a ‘Practice Corner’ category here. Back then, only 21 active users manifested their opinion and 71% of them said yes, they would like that.
It is important to note that 21 users is a very small sample of D&D’s 140-220 active users base (key stats can be found here).
There Bhante Sujato flagged that it was not something he would like to happen as that would definitely increase the reliance on active participation of moderators. This is for other online forums focused on practice end up turning into a very useless mess of views (see http://newbuddhist.com/)
I try as much as possible to guide my participation in this forum by the understanding this is above all be a place for people to discuss translations of EBTs and, to a limited extent, doctrinal implications or curiosities of the words being translated.
Hence, I usually browse D&D looking for another interesting essay by Bhante @Sujato on his translation project, or maybe a nice and polite conversation between him and Bhante @Brahmali on how to translate something. I also appreciate a lot the time and effort people like @Sylvester put up investigate peculiarities of Pali grammar and how things we usually take for granted in translations may not be so clearly stated in the original material.
If instead of these nice things I start seeing people here debating and fighting over seeing lights, light or strong jhanas, etc, I will just walk away and slowly forget this space… I already have my fair share of point of views-related stress in my professional life! 
EBT’s are about practice- just correct practice. There are aspects of right view which easy to discuss on a forum, but the vast majority of the suttas are about practice (morality, concentration and insight). If we make this only about translation I would find it boring and a waste of my time. Its good to strike a happy medium. The scholarship does have a civilising influence, best tempered by some civil discussion about practice based on suttas.
The issue is not what the vast majority of what D&D does but the odd thread that could give the newcomers a wrong impression and the regulars find intermittently stressful.
with metta
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Not true. This forum is above all a place to Discuss and Discover the suttas and the dhamma therein:
Hence, I usually browse Discuss & Discover looking for anything related to the suttas and the dhamma. Not just essays by the authorities or technical discussions on pali grammar.
On the Watercooler:
So this forum is clearly not just confined to discussion of translations. If the intention is to change it to that, then we should see what @sujato thinks. I personally disagree with such an intention.
Exactly Mat. I think this forum is brilliant. There may be some posts that I disagree with, but people should still be free to have their say, especially when they are quoting suttas! 
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I would like to suggest you don’t take my views on the matter as authoritative or a driver of change here.
Just like you I am just another user of this forum and I took the liberty to express how I approach it. Everyone is free to do as they wish when it comes to choosing how they make use of this space, or how they believe the space can be better used or not.
It is just like a real world Buddhist centre / monastery. There are those who like to come to such places just to sit, relax, hear the Dhamma from someone qualified or truly invested in it, and head back home. Others like to do that and as well hang out for a tea or chitchat…
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Your activity betrays your statement. You are one of the most active posters on this forum with regular posts in the watercooler and other non-sutta type posts, and such posts made by you are often very informative and intriguing.
Me neither. Who are the foreigners ? The Buddha and his disciples (foreigners to most of the western world) who instructed people with beautiful words and verses ? Or the current group of westerners who are translating old scripts ?
But I wander around mostly feeling like an alien life-form from outer space, so all groups and clans are equally foreign to me…
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@tommit is referring to this:
They will not lend ear, will not set their hearts on knowing them, will not regard these teachings [the suttas] as worth grasping or mastering. But they will listen when discourses that are literary works—the works of poets, elegant in sound, elegant in rhetoric, the work of outsiders, words of disciples—are recited. They will lend ear and set their hearts on knowing them. They will regard these teachings as worth grasping and mastering. https://suttacentral.net/en/an5.79/8.250-8.595
And then he says
So, @tommit is accusing us of not sincerely wanting to understand and practice the teachings of the buddha, and that we are merely focusing on the literary form and beauty of the suttas.
The point that tommit misses is that we are focusing on the content of suttas and not just on their literary form. Also, we are not focusing on literary works by other authors, which is in fact what the sutta advises against. In fact, this website is actually following the Buddha’s instruction by avoiding commentarial literature and focusing, pretty much, only on the suttas and discussing the translation, meaning, interpretation and dhamma expressed in the suttas.
Therefore, I completely disagree with tommit and I believe that everyone here is actually making a sincere and real effort to understand the very difficult and at times perplexing teachings of the Buddha as expressed in the suttas.
We will argue, disagree, things get heated. But I think we are all sincere in wanting to understand the real dhamma. No?
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Thanks for the background and perspective on this issue. I can readily defer to V. Sujato’s informed experience, and agree from my own browsing experience that entertaining “personal” experiences in such a broad audience on the internet opens Pandora’s box. Not to deny, however, that I have engaged in and witnessed insightful and rewarding exchanges along these lines. It does require, though, a degree of equanimous perspective on the nature of one’s own and others’ views that is rare in these venues.
What I had in mind in bringing this up here, however, is of another nature (at the risk of going ‘off-topic’, but hopefully getting an important point across – moderators pls advise if it should be forked to its own thread).
Example: In the popular topic of “hearing sound in jhana?” (debated on several forums) a crucial issue is rarely touched on, namely the gradations of meaning in the notion of ‘hearing’ – a spectrum between the extremes of, for instance:
a:) the mind senses the presence of auditory stimulus; and
b:) Gee. that’s the opening of the third movement in that historic 1962 performance with Leonard Bernstein and Glenn Gould of Brahm’s 1st Piano Concerto. Or, perhaps, oh, that’s Jimmy Hendrix rendition of “All along the Watch Tower…”.
Put another way, a distinction in ‘hearing’, a spectrum between knowing (‘noting’, gnosis) raw auditory stimulus and fully elaborated ‘listening to’.
That is to say, in some stages of (verifiable) appana-jhana, short of 4th and upwards, arguably (and from experience) the raw contact of auditory stimulus can jiggle the mind, so to speak, (technically, a wavering of the bhavanga citta by external stimulus), WITHOUT the mind being further moved, without ‘adverting’, ‘investigating’, ‘perceiving’ (categorizing, naming), javana (impulsions) kammic processing or final ‘registering’ of a full-blown cognitive process. That is, a facet of the mind recognizes the ‘touch’ of the stimulus, but with such a slight and transitory effect on absorption that its overall strength is not impacted. (It’s arguable that ‘absorption’ involves a definitive physiological neurological state that has a sense of momentum, or inertia, such that it can endure transitory impingement from other levels of sensory processing.)
Admittedly citing here perspectives from abhidhamma and even phenomenology, to the degree that, while not literally EBT, they can significantly contribute to sound insight (no pun intended). But not to overly push in this direction, as it tends to arouse ill-will (troll-like attacks) in some circles.
Put yet another way, there’s a trace of irony to the elaborate discussions of details of Pali declensions, conjugations, word roots, stems, etc., while hinging on rather naively unexamined (often framed in terms of ‘common sense’) usages of the English terms of translation – e.g. ‘hearing’. (Another notable example would be vitakka-vicara as ‘thought’.)
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You say one thing, you do the opposite … wrong word
You say that the only author who suttacentral deals with is the Buddha and that is not true. There are thousands of spurious authors who have written authentic barbarities and all they have had to do is introduce it into the canon pali.
Not even the four canonical nikayas are exempt from false suttas …
The AN is known by the amount of medieval literature that contains, but not even the MN is free of suspicion. Read the MN 91 and MN 92 and you can get an idea of the Buddha welcoming you by running your tongue through the holes of the ears and showing you his micropen …