Actually, no, it's not.
It's saying precisely what it's saying, albeit in a terse way.
By this point, anyone who's been here for any real length of time should know the rules. They're pretty clear, most of them. If you break a rule, ignorance of that rule is not an excuse.
Could Liam have phrased it better? Been politer? Sure he could, but I want you to consider a few things. None of these are excuses, but they are factors:
1. We're all human, and some of us (not me, thankfully, not yet anyway) are dealing with some pretty stress-inducing stuff. I'm not speaking to what Liam is or isn't dealing with, but perhaps his shortness and lack of explanation has its genesis in stress?
2. More importantly, people tend to try and test this rule, like, all the time. It happens far, far too often, in a big-picture sense. We're sick of it. Past a certain point, we don't bother explaining ourselves because, uh, rules. They're there. They've been made clear. We've argued, talked, cajoled, explained, and still people try and push. So past a certain point it's like, "you know what you did, now stop it, for pity's sake". And you know whose fault that is? Hint: it's not ours, or at the least, it's not ours alone.
If you expect us to be overly gentle, kind and considerate at all times, even when folks are deliberately trying to sneak around the rules we've put in place, I feel like maybe you're expecting too much of us. We try to be nice, we try to explain, but sometimes that doesn't happen as clearly or as gently as it should.
In the last year or so, do you know what the most thankless part of this job has been, for me at least? The repeated, nearly incessant reinforcement of rules which are, for the most part, common sense. People feel that they have a right to break rules, to push, to argue, to wheedle, or when all else fails, to either brute-force the situation or get sneaky. Sorry, folks; it doesn't work, and we aren't stupid. We know what you're doing, and in most cases, we can even infer what you're intending, and we're going to act on that. If you then call our methods into question because maybe we were a little shorter or less explanatory with you than we've been in the past, take a good hard look at your behaviour, and that of other forum members. No, we shouldn't be abusing you or attacking you, and no, we're not just hand-waving our actions as fine because it's a tough, thankless job. But if and when we err on the side of shortness, curtness or even sharpness from time to time, please understand that it is you, and other folks as well as you, who have contributed to the problem. It's us, too; we get tired of the same old arguments and having to enforce the same rules when people think they're above them, or should be.
Check out my Manamon text walkthrough at the following link:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/z8ls3rc3f4mkb … n.txt?dl=1