You’re worried about being blue-screened, aren’t you?
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Yes, Mr B. I am saying the rules are the problem. Loosen them a little or lose the whole thing. It is becoming a place overly concerned with the trivial and meaningless. If Cow and his opponent had been allowed to have it out without interference he may not have gotten so fed up and lost his cool.
The people who are here just to argue are getting too much power and those who really care about what they are talking about are losing patience. Placing such a value on the ability to keep one’s cool is the problem. That is easy if you don’t really care about conversation but only want to troll those who do. It might be a wider problem than just here. The internets are dominated by such crap discussions. I hoped this place could stay interesting.
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We’ve temporarily banned someone for hostility and flame-warring and, in private, a message that the recipient found threatening. The internet has plenty of places where people can do this sort of thing!
If you think this makes BBS boring and rule-bound, you’re welcome to say so. But I don’t think it’ll ever be the place you want it to be.
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I miss BoingBoing.
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How about this for a solution: Gladiatorial posting. I’m sure it’s been suggested elsewhere, but this is my idea:
When a battle starts to break out, invite the participants to a one on one, 20 minute session. Advertise it, hold it live, and give the audience “boo”, “hiss”, “Christ, what an asshole” buttons, plus free-form hollering.
This would all take place either side of the main debate. The audience can root for their gladiator, they choose left or right. The gladiators can see the audience responses scrolling along with their posts.
The audience can switch sides - ongoing voting, you can change your vote as the debate evolves.
At the end, if indeed both make it to the end, the performer with the highest tally wins. The loser agrees to keep the fight in the ring, at risk of permanent censure.
I compared BBS debate earlier to Greek antiquity, I’m moving time forward a little.
C’mon - you know you want to.
EDIT: If I get a MILLION LIKES then @codinghorror will implement my idea!! OK, so we haven’t discussed it, but I’m sure he’d be impressed. Fuck it. If I get a million likes, I’ll program it myself!
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I want to be a color commentator on that.
“Ooh, a ritual self-disemvowelling, nice touch at trying to gain some sympathy from the old-school crowd!”
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Well, I am not surprised at your smugness.
That is beautifully meta and imaginative. Well done, sir!
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Well, this is filed under Meta. I had no choice.
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I am, dude. But you ignored the main point of my reply. Can we try a different way of dealing with the trolls? It is an internet wide problem and really ruins any discussion (Oh, I am prone to hyperbole. I expect you can adjust.)
This could be the place to experiment with solving this. The community has a difficult time asserting standards when it is trapped by a set of rules that prevents real engagement. There must be a way to assert peer pressure and I don’t see it happening here. I see people giving up and going away to be replaced by more trolling types that only exist to bat back and forth BS.
I don’t have expectations about BBS. It is your place and I am OK with that, but things pop out that call for comment. Aren’t we trying to fine tune the idea of a forum?
Nasty personal humor rules the day, but it is ugly and stupid and might be called sophomoric by a more enlightened time.
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Looks to me like we’re having a pretty easy time of asserting our standard: that it is unacceptable to insult, threaten, bully or harass other users.
You said in another thread that there’s plenty of reason to insult people all the time, and you complained about it not being allowed.
I’m sorry, man. But this is not what BBS is about, for us, so maybe BBS is just not for you.
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I am responding to what I see going wrong. The other comment was part of my thinking about this. I thought it was worth saying and still do. I see insult all the time that goes unanswered because it is subtle and indirect or couched in false generosity. It needs to be addressed and flagging won’t cut it.
But, really, I don’t get along with anyone. So there is that.
But in all seriousness Rob, thanks for responding.
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How many people who miss Cow here also ‘miss Antinous’?
It seems to me that the tone of comments here seems noticeably more adversarial than we used to get on BB - probably because it’s much easier to have back and forths here, and the moderation, post Antinous seems a bit more hands off.
Personally, I miss a lot of what Cow used to post, so I hope he comes back, but if he does I hope he’s a little less keen to escalate things, and/or avoids some of the angrier discussions.
Can’t we all just get along?
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At the end of the day, the ancient adages are the best - “Don’t feed the trolls”.
Love the GIF
Well, no, but I won’t get drawn into those debates 
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As someone who has been a moderator on another board: It Ain’t Easy to make this sort of judgement call. No matter what you do or don’t do, someone is going to be displeased by your decision. All you can do, in the end, is (1) make an explicit set of rules very visible, (2) stick to those rules as closely as possible, (3) when someone is being a problem, discuss it directly with them to try to rectify it, and (4) if they’re unwilling or unable to play by the agreed upon rules, invite them to migrate to a system that operates by the conventions they prefer, or to start their own.
Editorial policy is not censorship. The man who owns the press gets to decide what he publishes. (Or she, or it, or whatever.)
The BBS is what its editors decide it is. You can certainly try to persuade them to shift the boundaries, but remember that unless you’re doing the work of enforcement – and taking the flack for it – you really don’t have a complete view of what’s going on. And, for privacy reasons, it’s likely you never will.
As everyone else has been saying: Deal with it. Or, as I more commonly say: Cope. If you need help, borrow a coping saw.
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That’s the thing. The moderation since moving to forums has been much laxer than it was when comments were directly after posts. It makes for a somewhat more rough-and-tumble environment, in certain ways. Making it even laxer is not a solution to whatever problems that development presents. But I’m not sure that more stringent moderation is, either. The vibe might be inherent to forums, as a medium, in the same way that a certain kind of entitlement thinking is inherent to inline comments.
Discourse is the best place to solve them, though, I’m certain of that.
Now, I think that this particular banning is a good first step in making clear that there are still boundaries we want to maintain. It’s easier to argue and disagree with one another in a heated way than it used to be, but similar sandlines (such as excessive hostility, and circumventing bans) remain, and the crossing of them get the same results: moderated or deleted comments, temporary bans, mocking GIFS.
Think of it like this: instead of eating with your own shiv-wielding jailer, the dinner table is now guarded by snipers and an animatronic childhood nightmare creature that likes ear scratches. You feel safer, don’t you?
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It is worth mentioning that the Discourse philosophy is “timeout”, versus “ban forever”. The idea is that people can modify their behaviors in good faith and return.
That is why in the software there is always a duration associated with the ban function, there is no “ban forever” button.
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