@kuvasz,
kuvasz wrote:So its not just the asshole on this thread who has spent 30 posts filibustering it you think is the problem, but the people who confront him for his behavior?
Yes. If you feed the trolls they'll come back for more. And giving them attention not only keeps them around but amplifies the noise. Instead of just the trolls disruptions you have double or triple the amount of noise generated in response. And even more specifically, we made a limit of X posts within X time unless someone else replies. The reason for this was to avoid allowing one person to render a thread useless. But each time someone else posts, this limitation is reset. So even worse for the rest of the thread perusers is that the useless replies to the useless trolling enable more trolling than would occur if the disrupting party had to wait for a useful post to reset the flood control.
As to the whole banning thing...
1) It's not appropriate for site staff to discuss individual banning with the general membership and public calls to ban a member are never going to be a part of the moderation process.
2) Using a flood of posts to disrupt threads
is something we will ban for as volume-based disruptions can render all social tools useless (imagine what it'd be like if we allowed robotic spam posts) but we are avoiding censorship in favor of giving the tools to the members to control what they see.
We are all supposed to be adults, and this is a free site without enough volunteers to staff it without having to get back to handholding disputes like flaming and trolling. And those are very subjective things that members are likely to disagree on our interpretation of with frequency so they are very labor intensive.
Instead we made (and are planning to keep making) tools to let the members have better control over their own experience and have made all the members moderators through voting. By default, when something is voted down enough by others it is collapsed. Users who don't want this to occur can disable it in their preferences, and it can be overridden on an individual basis through voting as well.
So if you want to take out the trash you can help do so. But it isn't reasonable to expect the site staff to do all the work forever. The community needs to be self-sustaining, and the only way for the moderation to perfectly scale with the activity levels if for the members themselves to become involved and for them to participate in the process.
This is why I said you should vote them down if you feel this way, instead of giving them attention and taking up more of the threads with their disruptions you can contribute to lessening their presence for those who have the default settings of collapsing topics and posts below a certain threshold.
It's a feature that could be a lot better, and that I have an algorithm ready to greatly improve it but it does currently work as long as the members want it to. But if you are determined to give the trolls attention then there's not much other than draconian control that we can do about it, and we aren't going there.
So that's why I vote down the folks who reward garbage with attention. They should help take out the trash instead of wallowing in it and spreading it around.
I know it isn't always easy to ignore, I don't always manage to myself, but as much as possible I recommend that people just don't take the bait and I ask that those who do care help moderate the site through voting.
