As a member of this forum, I have received a handful of warnings from
@BassTrackerBoats over the last 5 years - honestly they were all very much warranted - I'll be the first to admit I'm often wrong
Never for anything INTENTIONALLY malicious mind you, just the occasional lapse in judgement or inappropriate/controversey inciting shenanigans, but I digress.
The best advice I can give fo someone who, like me (inevitably) experiences a lapse in judgement here and there and find a lovely PM with a warning notice in their inbox (and this applies to pretty much every real-world circumstance in which you are not in absolute control or have the final undisputed say, which for most people will be pretty much everything)- is this :
A Little Bit Of Humility Goes A Long Way!
What @BassTrackerBoats Said was totally accuate, at least that's been my direct experience. It's easy to allow your emotions to get the best of you, and thee are PLENTY of forums out there who aren't as fortunate as we are to have reasonable mods. Because of this, it's not unlikely that you may have had poor experiences in other forum, therefore intensifying the inheraent human instinct of defensiveness, and be tempted to lash out or immediately reply to that warnng message with a skyscraper article that might as well be titied "5000 Reasons Why I'm Not Wrong" - it might help to try this.. This is what I choose to do anyway....
DO NOT RESPOND OR REACT RIGHT AWAY - I know myself well enough to know that if I do respond when irritated or feeling "slighted" (whether it is real or "imagined") I'm quite likely to say something that is either unnecessarily harsh or that I will otherwise later with I could retract. Don't try to put out a fire by pouring Gasoline all over it - in some situations the best course of action is to do nothing - at least not right away.
After that initial "pause", however long that needs to be for you (for me it's usually about 15 or 20) re-read that message, but with a differet objective in mind: Try to find where they may be RIGHT or where and how it could be understandable for them to have perceived (insert offending comment, message, posting, PM, etc) the way they did - WITHOUT any incorporating any supplementary conjunctions such as "but" or "However
Having made a concerted effort to see things from their perspecitve, you are then better fit to reach out to them, and address the issue. In my experience, I happened to be in the wrong each time I got a warning. That's just my truth - I'm generally a decent guy, but am lacking in tact at certain times. That, and I'm blessed with a dark and twisted sense of humor tht often times mortifies people - which I usually find even more hilarious - which can cause some riffs in any community setting, but that's just my truth.
The point is, that every time, having had the opportunity to see my part, and calmly approach the mod on question and accept responsibility for where I was, in fact, wrong and make a concerted effort to not repeat that behavior, it never fell on deaf ears and I'm still happily participating in BHW, about 6 years later, and in great standing with the forum.
tl;dr - When agitated, pause. Remove yourself from the situation and return later, evaluating it from the OPPOSITE perspectve of what your instincts would have otherwise told you to do. If you were, in fact, wrong - promptly admit it, and ammend the behavior by trying not to repeat the same behavior. Mods here are awesome, they're not like other forum mods.
@BassTrackerBoats Rocks btw .... When you interact with other members often enough and they participate enough in general discussion, you tend to get sense of who that person REALLY is, whether they mean to be transparent or not. I've never witnessed this guy say an unkind word to anyone or even respond in a "curt" manner - even when he would have been justified in doing so. Not many people I can say that about.