Hello
Right: you're quite right that generally, we think of a personal attack as being on an identifiable poster ('RowanMumsnet, you're a silly cow.')
A while back though, we came across a few situations in which groups of identifiable posters were being attacked thusly:
POSTER A 'I'm a RadFem and I think xxx'
POSTER B 'RadFems are all arses'
After quite a lot of this (and lots of representations from aggrieved posters) we came to the view that sometimes, a personal attack can be cloaked in a general observation - depending on what preceded it on the thread.
Now - we're NOT saying that Reality was deliberately attacking someone. (Until the government hurries up with making the contents of everybody's brains available in an easily-readable format, we can't know what people's motivations for their posts are.)
But the fact that her post was preceded by a few people saying 'I use the term BM' meant that her post ('if you use the term BM you're a fucknugget') did look like a PA on those people.
All of that said, this is definitely one of those borderline situations, and we do take on board that some of you think we were being hairtriggerish. These particular situations are always a bit difficult to judge correctly, and we sorry if we got it wrong.
Incidentally, I've just highly amused myself by coining the term 'modsplaining'.