Just a thought.
In the past we took the view that Officers should not post Application Threads until they were moved into the private Officer topic. There were a couple of reasons for this:
-it is the members who need to be airing their viewsd at that point, not officers
-many members will be swayed by any public officer comment, hence you might not get as truthful or hoonest response to the application as you would want
-you never know who else is reading the forums, so any officer comment can potentially cause issues further down the line
The odd light-hearted comment in a public thread usually does no harm, but in general it might be worth not posting your own views on the application until it gets in here - after all, officially no decision is made until it gets transferred into the Officer section, right?
TL.
point taken
Re my own post in that thread: that is simply stating a fact in the announced rules, and in obvious cases like this I think it's something we should try do - just to avoid people starting to comment, and than other people following up with "hey, he ha no sponsor, so can he even be invited?" etc.
Will not comment on the other.
On a general basis:
Basically, I think I would agree with you - Officers should take extra care when posting in application threads.
On the other hand, I also think we still should have the possibility to comment on applications as "normal" non-officer persons. This should still be limited to clear facts about the person, e.g. you have a personal experience from a PuG with the person, or you've read about the person on for instance the Aszune forum etc.
Personal opinions however is probably better saved for our private areas.