A note on troll engagement

Jonathan M Davis newsgroup.d at jmdavisprog.com
Mon Nov 27 19:57:08 UTC 2017


On Monday, November 27, 2017 19:30:36 Mengu via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Monday, 27 November 2017 at 17:44:54 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
>
> wrote:
> > All: we have had an increase in troll posts lately. Please
> > avoid engaging them and resist the urge to correct assertions
> > no matter how wrong, indignating, etc. The best response to
> > troll posts is spending the time that would elsewhere go in
> > flamewars, on good work. Feel free to use your newsreader's
> > "killfile" feature to filter away posts from aliases you assess
> > have a net negative contribution to this forum.
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Andrei
>
> we should switch to a forum software. enough is enough. we can't
> edit posts, we can't get rid of spammers and trolls. we don't
> have proper code formatting / syntax highlighting. what is
> holding you guys back?

I don't use the web interface for the newsgroup, and I have no interest in
doing so. I use the mailing list. The same goes for many of the major
contributors. Others use the newsgroup directly. IMHO, being stuck with any
form of forum software would be worse than being able to use my e-mail
client like I do now. Sure, editing posts would occasionally be nice, but it
rarely matters much, and I've never seen the lack of formatting or syntax
highlighting as being much of a problem. Plain text generally works for the
sort of communication that we have here - certainly it's not enough of a
problem for me to want to deal with forum software instead of a proper
mailing list.

Historically, spammers and trolls have only occasionally been a problem, and
outright spam does usually get removed from the newsgroup. We have
unfortunately had some major problems with a few recent threads where there
have been quite a few troll posts in them. So, it makes sense for Walter
and/or Andrei to speak up about it, but I expect that the problem will pass.
It always has before. If we follow Andrei's advice and do better at ignoring
the troll posts, it will blow over soon enough. And most of us don't really
want to have to have anyone around here spending their time moderating. We
spend too much of our time in useless chatter as it is instead of creating
or reviewing PRs.

- Jonathan M Davis



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