Co-opting a community topic to explain to the community what the “ground rules” should be for said topic
Challenging any member who disagreed with their statements by pointing out they were clearly inferior
Proceeding to taunt and belittle other members to try an instigate a flame war (see: trolling)
Then telling everyone how it didn’t matter anyway because he was trying to have a serious conversation but no one would rise to his challenge (see: sealioning)
Expressing his disappointment in the BBS community as a whole while, paradoxically, continuing to post here.
So rarely does the moderation team see a user flame out in a way that also happens to give us a Bingo on our cards. While impressive, we take no joy in the amount of effort cleaning up after the mess creates, the otherwise well-meaning posts eaten as collateral damage, or the effect it tends to have on the topic this all takes place in.
User NickyG given a timeout for trying to hijack and tone-police a topic.
People have differing opinions, and many people on the BBS happen to share certain opinions as a majority, just like in the real world. We don’t do “fair and balanced” here. If you aren’t prepared to defend a minority opinion from the opinions of others, then an active and skeptical environment like the BBS is not for you.
On the other hand, if your minority opinion is silenced by posts that are against our community guidelines, definitely flag those posts. We take that sort of chilling effect on speech seriously here, too.
Several users have decided to levy personal attacks against multiple Authors.
While I usually aim for transparency in moderation actions in this topic, I am not going to amplify users who resort to threatening or derogatory behaviours here.
Take such discussions elsewhere, and don’t expect your account to remain here if you make threats regardless of your platform of choice to do so.
Thank you for all the effort moderating the community, I usually don’t see the messages you mention because they were already flagged and deleted.
But, as you mention, users (including me) are more prone to engage than just flag the messages/topic and I was wondering if it will require too much work to archive some of them as examples of how to spot such abusive messages, for example, messages from point 1 usually just look obnoxious to me and I don’t have a good reference to judge if I should just ignore it for my own benefit or flag it.
Yes, I’ve read them when I created the account, but it focus on what I should not do to start deranging the threads, but it is too vague on how to avoid trollies and other users acting in bad faith:
Assume good faith and like the good. However, flag the bad, and avoid contentless comments.
As a said above, this is too vague.
And, I can see myself just assuming that the driving trollies poster is just obnoxious and point that in good faith, which will generate more messages to be eaten later, instead of not engaging and flagging it, because I don’t see what are the messages that should be treated like that and I don’t have a reference to judge them.
It’s hard for me to assume good faith you really can’t tell what a troll is.
I’ve had disagreements here and there are a few folks who don’t like me for it, but I stay despite the occasional flag because people “know it when they see it” (to quote Potter Stewart) when someone is actively stirring the pot vs being authentic and accidentally crossing a line.
Rules are sometimes vague. This is good, because then ppl can’t rules lawyer.
Just try to respond to points logically and if logic generates more extreme reactions you know to pause and flag.
The obvious trollies are obvious.
But, for some threads that I remember that disappeared later (and I might have participated), I could not see the initial posts as driving trollies, maybe just as weak or maybe misinformed.
IIRC, I disengaged because people were still arguing and it was not going anywhere (what might happen even if not driving trollies is involved) and that seemed pointless to me, but it was not disrespecting at that point.
I will try to pay more attention, but I also want to avoid flagging them too easily, because it is also another thread that the mods have to check.
It seems to me that not everyone takes enough time to read carefully and make sure they really understand what the other person is saying (or attempting to say as best they can), before jumping to a conclusion and flagging or responding negatively.
And, it seems to me that trouble often happens when a poster may not have English as their first/native language. This is a U.S.-based blog, and many commenters here are from the U.S, and I think we could stand to make more allowances for the fact that others may have different experience with the use of English.
We can ask ourselves “Am I sure that I’ve read that correctly? Is there any chance that I’ve misunderstood the person’s meaning?”—and ask ourselves that twice!—before we respond in a negative way.
I’d defer to @orenwolf but it might be better to use the “other” box to type out an explanation of why you feel it’s a trolley. Mods might not have time to read a whole thread and gain context or look through a post history to spot a pattern.
In my experience if I take the time to articulate why I feel something violates the guidelines and what guidine it is violating, I see things removed.
Also it’s my understanding the system also automatically de-emphasizes folks who inaccurately flag, so again while I defer to the mods I would say don’t flag less, just flag smarter.
Not enough folks flag now. If your spidey sense says this seems off, flag it. We would much rather dig through a few flags than try and comb every post daily hoping to find issues. That community involvement is key to the BBS having effective moderation.
We literally cannot moderate the post volume here without your collective assistance, so thank you!
The flagging system, if it’s used the same way here as it is on the stuff I use discourse for, really draws moderator’s attentions when multiple people are flagging. Sure, it’ll ignore some people that have a history of flagging incorrectly, but the thing that draws the attention isn’t whether or not you’re a trustworthy flagger or not, it’s whether multiple people are trustworthy flaggers.
User John_Parkhill asked not to return after 1) playing the “I’m not at risk and affect no one but myself” game, while simultaneously applauding and encouraging the assault of those trying to get people to think of others, with an extra helping of “I don’t see anything like this so clearly this isn’t true” for good measure.
I am saddened that self-awareness is apparently lacking in so many right now, but I (and the Authors) draw the line at folks supporting/encouraging the assault of anyone being permitted on the BBS.
