I guess I'm confused. If the issue is personal attacks, and that's what's not allowed, then why not say "personal attacks?" Or are you saying that looking through someone's post history and then composing a new post based on someone else's post history to point out contradictions or reasons to doubt someone's credibility on certain issues is, itself, always a personal attack? If so I guess I'm in trouble because I've done that plenty of times, including to you. *shrugs*
Before I was a moderator I thought it was kind of pointless when a moderator would post “stop the personal attacks” or “knock it off with the trolling” with no further explanation of what happened, so I try to be more specific than that.
I assume everyone already understands that general personal attacks are always not allowed, so I mention the exact category of personal attack that occurred so people can avoid using that topic in future posts. I guess I can add a “stop all personal attacks, including: (category)” before those messages if it makes it more clear. Thank you for the feedback.
Bringing up someone’s posting history to contradict them is fine, it’s just against the rules to antagonize them out of nowhere on a personal level to get them to fight back, like posting “wow more garbage from (name) stop posting this trash you stupid loser” in their thread.
The way a moderator breaks that down is “you stupid loser” upgrades it to a personal attack because it’s insulting the person’s real world value/intelligence. Without that part, it would only have been trolling which is a lesser infraction, as it only attacked their post content and not them. The aggressiveness or snideness is what changes it from acceptable to trolling. The non-trolling way to say it would be something like “You’ve made 3 threads this week about the same thing, just stop already, it’s getting annoying.”
It can also be considered trolling if the person posting the comment has a long history of purposely trying to rile up the target to make them get themselves in trouble, despite only using barely within the rules pokes and prods, although that’s mostly just up to the moderator’s judgement on intent and discussion about it with other moderators. There’s an appeal process as well in case the moderator judged a comment too harshly.