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Thread's gonna die soon, so I'll just say this:
If you disagree with my assessment of informal fallacies, next time you think someone is making an ad hominem or an appeal to ignorance or whatever, do the exercise of actually trying to prove to yourself that the culprit is doing something illogical. No, simply pattern-matching it against the template of the informal fallacy doesn't cut it. Actually show that because it fits that template, it is necessarily illogical. The only way to prove it is by making a formal argument, and the only way to make this formal argument would be to try to interpret the informal argument as a formal one. Once you do that, 9/10 times you just get some kind of a strawman.