request for moderation

John Reimer terminal.node at gmail.com
Sun Mar 16 07:51:48 PDT 2008


Christopher Wright wrote:
> John Reimer wrote:
>> Is it easy to ignore?  A number of people have been responding to 
>> these posts requesting that they stop... so I actually disagree.  
>> Either I'm vastly over-estimating the problem or you are vastly 
>> ignoring it.
> 
> Yes, I am, with almost no effort!
> 
>> This is possible, but not the only reason.  I'm surprised that you are 
>> confident that this poster has been using filtering.
> 
> If you want to ignore all of one person's posts and you're not using 
> filtering, it's your own fault that you have to see their posts. 
> Thunderbird is free, it runs on about four major operating systems 
> (sorry, BeOS users), and it supports filtering.
> 
> Even if you refuse to use a news client that lets you filter out 
> people's messages, you can just skip any message from a known and 
> habitual troll. They don't walk into your living room, tape your eyes 
> open, and display their messages to you; you have to expend effort to 
> read their messages. And with a single keypress, you can skip on to the 
> next message.
> 
> Now, if two people you respect are flaming each other, that might upset 
> you, and reasonably so. If you know them well enough, you should contact 
> them in private and ask them to stop. And if they continue, well, that's 
> their right. You should then ignore them.
> 
>> Actually, it is a problem because filtering will not work if others 
>> respond and quote the messages of the individual.  I suppose that 
>> calls for another layer of filtering? :)
> 
> Again, spacebar sends you to the next message. Or you could filter 
> messages that contain the term "Ty Tower wrote:" and get 90% of replies 
> to his posts, though that includes indirect ones.
> 


Good to know that that works for you, though I don't think you are 
seeing the problem, or we have different ideas about how this community 
should work. I'm guessing it's more the latter (many here see it as a 
personal right to say whatever they want, devoid of responsibility). 
I'm guessing also that I'm looking at this on the large scale, not the 
individual one, as you are.

For one, a problem not dealt with gets worse and spreads and eventually 
inflames a community overall such that filtering barriers are eventually 
going to be "overrun."  For two, filtering won't initially work for the 
many new D users that come to the community to see what the language is 
about; these see the in-fighting and trolling that goes on and get a bad 
impression of the language community (perhaps this is inevitable).  The 
problem has much more significance than the personal "I don't like this 
post" scale.  That's what I'm trying to address.

For those of us already here, we can certainly put your suggestion to 
use (which would be a good start), but eventually find ourselves trying 
to skip and avoid many topics and applying just as much effort in not 
reading the abrasive posts as finding the useful ones.  This may not be 
the case yet, but as the problem gets ignored this way, it grows.

Nonetheless, your advice is sound for the time being, since there is no 
other solution for those that remain here... and quite possibly will 
never be.

For the rest of us who can't hack it, I suppose the best solution will 
be to do what many others have done and leave the D newsgroup completely 
(not the D language, necessarily :) ).  That's likely the better one for 
those of us who are becoming weary of hearing the "free speech" mantra 
claiming that everyone can just do what they want ("just don't look when 
Joe shoots Jim... nobody is taping your eyes open", even when these 
things tend to pop up spontaneously).  In actual fact, I believe that is 
the philosophy of this group, and I'm afraid it's taken me awhile to 
figure that out; if that's the way it will stay, I think it's time I 
honestly evaluate why I read or write any posts here.

Anyway, thank you for your suggestion.

-JJR



More information about the Digitalmars-d mailing list