Quote:
Originally Posted by nohmi2
One cannot help but feel that there is a small coterie of members who are immune to the usual restraints which some of us adhere to.
(...)
It isn't only the trolls who are a problem.
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I would have to agree with this. In the recent incident, the person who was later revealed as a troll started out with relatively reasonable posts, and remained so for a long time in the face of vehement replies from several members. The only offensive aspect, at first, was the number of posts, which had the effect of completely hijacking one thread, and probably would have done so with another.
On the other hand, we have a number of long-standing, and usually also reasonable, members who seem to go up in flame when certain subjects are mentioned. It seems understandable to me that mods will hesitate before censoring them, and yet it can give the wrong idea to new users, and it may encourage trolling in some cases.
Quote:
Originally Posted by TGS
It's an imperfect world - and I don't think it can be legislated to perfection.
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I agree 100%, and I think mods have been doing a great job so far. I don't think that adding more rules will make things better. Possibly it could make them worse.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Worldwalker
It's possible that we have multiple types of users. Those might include the technical-question user, who starts in the software/device/whatever forum they need, and later migrates elsewhere, the social user, who starts in "hello", moves to the Lounge, and maybe later on checks out News or General, and perhaps the author user, who posts mostly or entirely to Self-Promotion or Freebies. Those are all different sorts of people, and likely to act in different ways. Of course, they overlap in all directions (a recent problematic author comes to mind), and they morph into each other, but I think looking at where they start and where they progress might be important. That's particularly true for ourselves; in the discussion here, I've seen several people (me included) sort of assuming that users follow our own pattern, and that's really only true for our own flavor of users.
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Absolutely, and that is one of the reasons why more rules would probably be counter-productive.