Re-post: How to deal with trolls

I like it. It looks like Christmas Star decorations I have. They are bigger of course :smiley:

PS… Just noticed you had a bent feeling. :open_mouth:

Remember… I have a couple of spares if you need one. :wink:

I think I’ll wait for the bogof coupon :smiley:

bogof = buy one get one free.

Thanks mate but I’m ok , I just straightened it out , I used a big hammer.

This 6 branches suriken covered with blood seems a bit offensive/deadly but definitely looks cool.

:smiley: :smiley: . :+1: . :beer:

Your welcome…. I understand. It is always best to recycle those feelings if ya’ can.

If it is really bent bad…. use some heat from an acetyl torch as you hammer.

It’ll straighten right out. :wink:

I try not to say too much in these threads, lest it could be construed as escalating, but I agree with very much of what has been said above.
I will add, however, I find the people who can’t just let things go, and always have to have the last word, sometimes even well after the subject has been dropped or changed, far more annoying than the so-called “trolls”.

Yes, exactly. That’s why the “drop the subject” rule is so incredibly important.

Please be assured that is precisely what I do almost on a daily basis. But there’s a huge difference between somebody who is having a bad day or genuinely doesn’t understand the rules, and a malicious troublemaker. I will only continue to gently remind or reprimand users until their real character and intentions become apparent.

I care. BLF is not meant to be a place for people to pile on others or flaunt their most offensive traits. There are plenty of forums and social platforms where such toxic behavior is tolerated or even encouraged. Here, it’s prohibited. No ifs or buts about it. If such behavior has cropped up here at any given point in a certain thread, it’s either because I was unaware of the situation or else I was in the process of evaluating/moderating the situation as I described above.

Exactly. For a long time, I was happy to accept anyone and everyone. But over time, and after a lot of drama, I ended up with two simple rules or requirements for the people I’m willing to associate with:

  1. Good intentions. Must not do harmful things on purpose.
  2. Runs out of pencil before running out of eraser. People aren’t perfect, so they fail sometimes. That’s fine, but if they fail a lot and they fail at me or in ways which hurt people I care about, then I generally try to cut ties.

Yeah… it’s not about intolerance or snowflakes or free speech. If the strongest justification one can make for saying something is that it’s not literally illegal to say out loud, that’s a pretty weak argument.

The question we should be discussing is… What kind of forum do we want to be? Who gets to feel welcome or unwelcome? Should we allow posts which pick fights? And when it happens, should we allow posts calling out the bad behavior? Does hosting the words of troublemakers (or to a lesser extent, troubleshooters) foster or detract from the kind of environment we want to create? These are the type of questions we should be discussing instead of the irrelevant question “Is user123 a troll?” or “Does the forum allow free speech?” Because what’s up for discussion are not Constitutional rights… but the norms of conduct for a particular forum. No one who understands the workings of a community would say that there should be no rules. That is the position of a badly-behaved person who is angry that he can’t say rude things without meeting resistance.

In general it’s pretty clear what the policy should be for troublemakers — basically a big “NOPE”. The more complicated part is the policy for troubleshooters. Because attempting to deal with troublemakers is … difficult. Attempts can make the situation better, but can also make it worse. And people aren’t usually great judges of which way that’s going to go. It ends up as a battle of wits, but it’s not a fair fight. The person causing trouble has a pretty big advantage, since it’s a lot easier to break things than to fix things.

So … it’s complicated. Good solutions take a while to figure out.

sb has it sussed :+1:

Yep, ^ this. Well stated. Thus far, the official policy has been “don’t intervene or respond in any way, hit the Report button, and/or PM me.” I’m not saying that I’m opposed to revising that policy, but the drama in the recent days happened despite the well-intentioned “troubleshooters” as TK puts it, and it very possibly would have been avoided or been less explosive without the intervention from other users.

Sorry about intervening.

I will try to learn from my mistakes, including this one.

The real problem is with the trolls, not well-intentioned users. So thanks at any rate for your good intentions.

We have had trolls before but the last day was more like a high school bully.

True that.

At any rate, please be assured that I take these problems very seriously, and I regularly ban accounts behind the scenes. I just don’t usually make public banning announcements so as to avoid turning BLF into a public execution ground. I also don’t want to give the troll(s) any more recognition than they already got, and I don’t want other users to take sides.

Teacher get banned?

Private executions only, got it :smiley: :+1:
I understand not announcing such things but with a member like Teacher having such a high post count and apparently quite popular too, members want to know.
It’s obvious he’s gone so a simple yes or he decided it best to leave would have been an answer.
Guys, if I’m not here tomorrow, you know what happened… :innocent:

Well, since the subject came up, that would be a “yes”. It was a long and complicated decision with multiple warnings and previously a temporary ban, but that’s where it’s at now.

Please do not discuss this decision here or anywhere else on BLF. Such comments would be considered as controversial and will be removed. I don’t mean to be overly strict about this, but 9 years of experience lets me predict with absolute 100% certainty that discussing the question of banned members will only create a mess. Thanks in advance!

:+1: :beer: