How to advise non-WP forum moderators about possible aspies?

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Hi again,

I only seem to come here when I'm really frustrated - sorry for that!

I'm mostly lurking on several atheist and gaming forums (under a different handle, so I'm not going into details). It just happened for the third time in just a few months, that an apparently different person left a forum, because their way of communicating was met with extensive joking, rolling eyes smilies, or "lighten up" and "relax" type of comments or angry, dismissive comments. Yet they were trying to ask about the rules and/or why someone found their post funny, when it was not so intended.

I of course cannot diagnose anyone based only on what they type, but to me each of these three cases (on two different sites) just screamed "spectrum!" I tried PMing one of these people once, but he (?) never answered. I saw someone else suggest to another guy (?) ("guy A") that he was an aspie, and A threw a hissy fit about personal insults and left before the mods even had a chance of seeing the problem. Yet it seems quite likely that there was something to it: A posted massively, and only about few details in the general topic of the forum, and his posts usually were very long and very detailed.

The third, most recent case was maybe the saddest. This guy (B) was making assumptions about why another poster was posting what he (?) did, things like motivation and values. A moderator pointed out that inferences about a person's feelings etc. are not OK on that forum. B responded that did not fully understand and asked for a better (or maybe it was "more detailed") explanation. He got that but was still not satisfied. At this point several non-mod members jumped in, AFAICS trying to help the situation by telling jokes about how they had messed up when they were new and using metaphors to clarify the rules, and B reacted like "why are you all making fun of me?" and "why don't you take your own rules seriously?"

I was feeling very bad for him, seeing all this unfold in real time - he was clearly getting angrier and more confused by the minute, and the other people were getting angry back, but what could one do? In the end he just left.

Is there any good way to explain to non-WP forum moderators who AFAIK do not know about adults on autism spectrum that they should be prepared for someone who takes things quite literally, for whom e.g. forum rules need to be explained with words that have as few and as exact as possible dictionary definitions and NOT with metaphors? And what could such "being prepared" be in practice?

Trying to "out" someone based on just a guess seems like a very bad idea, so educating the forum members in general does not seem feasible to me.

Opinions? Experiences?

Situations like this are so hard. On one hand, you just want to protect whoever is being attacked if the reason they are being attacked is because of AS. But on the other hand, it is up to them whether they want to disclose that to the forum or not. And that's the sad part of it, as more information and knowledge about ASD will likely make the public more aware of these disorders and **appropriate** ways to treat the person online.

I see this happening all over the net with people on the spectrum, and honestly, it makes me sick to the point that this is the only forum I am on. People choose to be so ignorant and cruel on forums and are so quick to exclude or make fun of someone without even considering that there are legitimate social processing issues involved. When it is clear that there are, the people only bash and exclude the person some more.

It honestly makes me want to cry.