I'm sorry, but man up is the appropriate response. It's a forum. Nobody called him. Nobody showed up to his house. A post on a thread is not the equivalent. And to even call it a veiled threat stretches the bounds.
The actions of the staff member(s) were wrong, if true. But the attitudes of these "men" over issues that happened on a forum are not appropriate. I know all about getting mad at things that happen online. (And I know that I probably could have used similar admonitions.) But that's not reality. It never affected my real life. I didn't take it out on my family. It didn't affect my job performance. And I'm certainly not going to another site to complain about how devastated my life is now because someone was mean to me online.
I guess we now need "safe spaces" online because some folks just can't get up from their computers.
1. It's veiled because the troll addressed my first sock, known only to a limited number of people at that time, with a question of how I would choose to die, a question I had already answered.
2. To date, no, no one has showed up to my current residence over this issue. However, there are some truly sick people over there and they have a well known habit of weaving grand stories out of little tidbits of information. Some of them are on psych meds. I'm sure that should I ever get a real life visit over some grievance that started online, it would almost definitely not be by a woman. It would be by a man she is manipulating. In this specific case of the staff member, I very much doubt she could wield that kind of influence. There are others though, that have and do.
3. Psychological warfare is real, and people do snap over it. The videos that a person created and that I linked under an alt after I found them on youtube in a moment of anger is a perfect example of that. It's just pictures and sounds on a screen, right? Well, they can have real influence in people's lives.
A certain person deserves credit for clearing my name over that, even though he is not a friend - at least it shows character. His username is Paulie079.