With the new laxness of this BBS, I find there are certain users, those who immediately respond with ad hominem attacks and an assumption of bad faith, that I’d rather not interact with.
Reddit has a minimal, workable Ignore User feature. But this BBS seems to have nothing(?)
Is there such a feature, but I cannot find it?
Does such a feature exist with the BBS package, but is not turned on? Might that be considered?
See So when does an ignore user or downvotes system get implemented?
If you see ad hominem attacks, please flag them.
Treat the disease, not the symptom – users who regularly engage in negative behavior patterns should be suspended, not ignored.
I’m still noodling around on a Greasemonkey script to do exactly that. I’ll update you if I make any progress.
Which is more efficient? Having a Mod running all over the place or empowering each individual user to customize his own experience? What happens when the Mod’s POV differs from the user’s? The utility of the ignore system is that even if the user is overly sensitive or outright wrong, he still has the ability to remedy the situation. And it means Mods can be more productive and can hone in on more serious problems, since many users won’t be msg’ing him in the first place.
In my case, I dealt with someone who knows to skirt the edge of causing offense (calling someone “little doggie” instead of “bitch”, sarcastically calling someone “honey”, then claiming its a term of endearment), fires volleys of ad hominem accusations upon first glimmers of disagreement with his stated, fragile opinion. This isn’t someone who can or even should be banned. He’s just an unpleasant psuedo-intellectual whose opinion and style I don’t need to interact with: for me, an Ignore Feature would be ideal.
“Discourse” is the underlying package being implemented for boingboing BBS? And Discourse has as yet no implemented Ignore Feature? So, any discussion is rather academic? If so, perhaps they should consider it for the arguments made above. (I support the decision made regarding not implementing Downvotes, btw.)
I think behaviors like that are absolutely grounds for suspension, and suspension durations are squared each time if there is more than one suspension event.
Moderation has been going as we want it to be on BBS. If you don’t like something, flag it.
We’re much more interested in a single canonical, moderated reading experience shared by the readership at large than providing a platform for people to filter and tailor to their own needs.
Flagging code words like “little doggie” and “honey” works, though; in this particular instance the commenter has been asked to stop, has stopped doing it, and understands the consequences of continuing to do it.
Rather than return offense for perceived offense, or wall people off when you played your part, sometimes the best response is to ignore someone, or find a point of agreement before finding one of disagreement. Call that aspirational wisdom. It is hard to judge intent on the interwebs, but a spoonful of sugar something something.something something.
I can see your points and validate them to some degree, and I bowed out of yesterdays donnybrook pretty early when it started getting personal; I submit for your consideration that sometimes we are the victim of our own POV more than anyone else’s ill intent. When you cannot offer the benefit of the doubt, why keep engaging? Feeling attacked is not always “being attacked”. Strong opinions are not always about you.
Disagreeing agreeably is a big deal. Asking questions to make sure you understand what the other person has to say, and also focusing on communicating what you think about the topic at hand (rather than about the other human being you are speaking to), will generally work better to prevent escalation of rhetoric, in most situations, than what appears to be a character assassination and labeling.
That said, it takes all kinds to fill a freeway. Thank you for considering my POV.
It’s hard to say sometimes when someone is posting in bad faith or maybe they’re just a true believer with wrong opinions. It’s heavy handed to come in and ban them for being wrong and passionate, but at the same time they’re shitting up the thread and dropping the signal to noise down into the gutter.
There are certain topics that will always bring out the trolls. Heck, there is a paid trolling industry out there that does this as a fulltime job. But they’re good at what they do and rarely make smoking gun posts that make them easy to ban. An ignore user button can be thought of as a soft moderation tool. Maybe if a user racks up too many ignores then a mod gets notified and can consider an outright ban or probation.
While trolling is a problem, so are overly authoritarian mods who turn their forums into echo chambers squelching any alternative point of view or dissenting opinion as heresy. Getting the balance right is something every forum deals with and nobody has a perfect solution, but I’ve definitely seen both sides of the coin. BB is pretty good right now, but the community is relatively small and these problems often escalate as the userbase grows.
Then that person should be suspended. (And hasn’t, thus far.) I have had my share of annoyances with him doing exactly what Petzl has described: skirting the edge of offense, getting a slight rise and then taking that wayyyy out of context, blowing it up and then reporting ME for it. I think he derives some kind of sick satisfaction out of baiting people.
The problem is this is a pattern that hasn’t been dealt with as a disease, because if the mods took a good, long look at his history, you would see that there hasn’t been reform, but continual slippage back into the same ol’ pseudo-intellectual baiting behaviors. Anyways, $0.02… I’m with ya, Petzl. I share your frustrations about this.
The main thing to do is keep pointing it out when it happens, via flags.
I wonder…
What happens if that doesn’t work.
What happens if a large number of users think something is flaggable, but the general assembly of moderators don’t agree. I mean, Ideally it would be a prompt to go away, think about why there’s this sort of disconnect and try to reconcile the moderation and the user base, but if it doesn’t work out, we’d end up in a bit of a wierd place, where moderation is swift, and flags work, except for some people who have an inexplicable (from the user’s point of view) immunity to Luck Dragon.
That was a bit rambly, but do you see what I mean?
Bring it up in a new meta topic, with some specifics (though not pointing at any specific user, just actions).
Feature now exists. Look in your preferences under
Users
Muted
This simply suppresses all notifications (including PMs) from that user. It does not disappear them from the world, or in fact, this discussion area.
I note that I mostly get the “use the Ignore feature” from sites that don’t moderate anything past death threats, BB has pretty active moderation and the jerks don’t stay around for too long. And the flags are most certainly read and acted upon.
