Trolls, or trolling behaviour ...how do we deal with these isues as an online community?

the post has received enough down-votes to be collapsed for those not logged in...

Probably not. I'm not hostile to the concept of community, but at the same time, the community doesn't suffer if i don't exercise the options which other members of the community want.

Both the Wabbit's response and yours seem to assume that i think the feature should go away. I haven't said anything of the kind. I was only speaking for myself, and saying that i found it meaningless, and that i suspect that many people who vote down posts do so because they don't want to have to see them. For myself, i'm perfectly able to ignore posts or person without programming assistance.

thus eliminated from a2k for a huge chunk of the readership, the exact fraction not known because robbert has not told us, but likely the majority. Most sites run about 50/50 non registered lurkers and registered, and registered can and presumably do collapse low rated threads and posts.

Well, if these putative "lost" posts (please, get a grip) were your posts, primarily, that would be a good thing. An added benefit is that you can console yourself that your paranoid delusions with regard to this site are justified.

I notice that you do not dispute the factual basis of my post....

Ms. Olga, perhaps part of your problem is that real-life concepts like "bullying" and "stalking" don't universally map to cyber-life the way you expect them to.

Take bullying: on a schoolyard, bullies subject their victims through physical violence, or credible threats of physical violence. How does that map to cyber- life? How does one swing a fist online? One doesn't. It's all just words. Nobody can hurt you in an online community unless you let them -- unless you give the trolls standing to hurt you first. So, don't! And don't worry about them ruining threads. Threads are not schoolyards, and you are not a teacher here. If a thread of yours is still ruined after you've ignored the trolls, consider PMs discouraging the reasonable people from responding to them. "Public" interventions won't get you anywhere.

"Stalking" is even more complicated. It means that somebody is following you around in your private life. But A2K, despite it's family feeling, is not your private life. Everything anybody says in a thread here is published for the whole Internet to see, and hence for the whole Internet to comment on -- positive or negative. By your standards, I'm quite probably a stalker myself. I have a few favorites here on A2K, of whom I read more or less every post they write. If I did that in their private, real lives (listening to every word they say), that would no doubt be stalking. But here it's not. Because posts are publications, reading and responding to every post of poster X is fair game for me. It's as fair as it would be if you read every column by your favorite commentator in your newspaper -- and wrote a letter to the editor about it. If this thought makes you uncomfortable, you need to reconsider what, and how much, you're posting here.

Monterey is a nice guy but habitually so far behind the curve he's not even worth the time to point him in the right direction, but this is the first time in all the years I've known you that you also fall for the facile-and-facilely-wrong. Look up Joe's post on the previous page to see why. Those who wasted their time downgrading my (or any anybody else's) posts may have an epiphany yet - especially if Rama Fuchs is still reading us and decides to come back <G>

There's no mapping in the sense of one-to-one correspondence, certainly, but the general concepts are still as valid online as they are in physical reality.

that would have been fine as a PM to aidan.
as a post it is totally inappropriate...

no you don't understand

high seas is always right

always

Make that three.

Never, under any circumstances whatsoever, do I find sending a PM to a completely unknown poster "appropriate". I instantly delete any such posts addressed to me - in fact so far there's been only one, by chai-something-or-other, and I immediately posted on the open thread that I wished no more communications from him or her. Truly I'm surprised you would support such a course of action.

Region - even in a pm - that information being given to me by High Seas would have been inappropriate and would have totally freaked me out.
I'm glad she did it right out in the open. If I got a pm like that I'd have been like, 'What the hell?!' Who IS this person and what the heck is she thinking of? Where's her head at anyway...?'
I have never even spoken to Ramafuchs. I just enjoyed reading his posts - I enjoyed his use of the English language.
And he doesn't know me at all. I'm sure he wouldn't want me to have his personal contact information (as someone who is a total stranger to him and his wife and family).

What High Seas did, aside from invading Ramafuch's privacy-is akin to what third graders do when they say stuff like, 'Oh you think he's funny...why don't you call him - here's his phone number.'

What an infantile and stupid thing to say to an adult who has simply said about another adult no more than- 'I thought he was funny and I enjoyed reading his posts.'

And you know - I have no doubt High Seas can figure out a lot of stuff and if she doesn't mind broadcasting peoples' personal information without their express permission - the thought of that certainly bothers me more than any other sort of trolling I see going on here.

Most of it is harmless and sometimes even funny. But that sort of thing isn't.

Huh?

That's what the PM function is for, to keep private stuff off the open threads which are accessible to the entire planet Earth and probably to some other planets as well. I don't understand your objection to its use at all.

LOL Andrew - I remember a sequence of threads by Mrs Merry Andrew along the lines of "Who Are the HOT Women on A2K"? I never open unsolicited (or at least without prior permission granted on the open internet) PMs, but of course what you do with said hotties is none of my business

You missed one more (I think Ionus) and you definitely can count me into that group as number 5 - and btw whoever said that web2, semantic web, or even google's algorithms not logged-in cannot read marked-down posts better talk to a competent programmer: Robert Gentel is as good as any.

What has this got to do with anything, let alone what Merry asked of you?

Discussing such obviously funny issues bothers you, does it? Your bag tends more towards engaging in lies, name-dropping and proffering fatuous statements about things you know nothing of.

You've found a way to delete PMs?

As I said I only ever got one on this forum, from the poster previously named. I didn't open it, I posted the polite version of take-a-hike online, and at the time the software here permitted deleting or ignoring incoming PMs. The person never once bothered me again, to his/her credit.

aidan is a 'completely unknown poster' to you, yet you replied to her on this thread.

other than sparing the rest of us from reading what you wrote, how is sending her a PM different?