On Forum Moderation

[Jonathan Marler]

On Tuesday, 22 October 2019 at 19:44:22 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
> On Tuesday, 22 October 2019 at 19:11:39 UTC, Walter Bright 
> wrote:
>> On 10/21/2019 2:45 PM, welkam wrote:
>>> On Monday, 21 October 2019 at 07:16:16 UTC, Walter Bright 
>>> wrote:
>>>> Mike's advice is still good. Don't reply to people who push 
>>>> your buttons.
>>> 
>>> And all the C programmer need to pay more attention when 
>>> writing their code so they would not get buffer overflows.
>>
>> Buffer overflows are unintentional. Replies are intentional. 
>> The analogy isn't apt.
>>
>> Nevertheless, I do know that asking people to not reply to 
>> trolls doesn't work. This is where experience comes in - it 
>> takes a few years for youthful enthusiasm "this time it will 
>> be different" to reply to be battered into bitter oblivion by 
>> experience.
>
> I'll repeat that ignoring trolls doesn't solve the problem. If 
> someone says in 40 different threads that they don't use D 
> because of the D1/D2 split, and nobody responds to say "that's 
> BS" then thousands of people that don't know D will come across 
> those posts, assume it's true, and move on to a different 
> language. Or worse, they'll see one troll talking about D's 
> compiler bugs and another troll talking about D being a dead 
> language and another troll talking about something else. Nuke 
> those posts and the problem is solved.

How do you decide when someone is trolling and when someone is 
making valid criticism?  Some people could consider your last 
post as trolling as you're criticizing how D decides to moderate 
its forums.

People should be free to express and discuss their criticism.  I 
think the only time moderators should step in is if the 
discussion devolves into harrasment or something inappropriate.  
It's still not easy to define what that is, but the point is that 
deciding to silence or remove people's discussion is a big deal, 
it should be a last resort.

You do bring up a good point that alot of posts/discussion don't 
add anything and can leave a negative impression.  However, 
rather than removing posts of this nature, I would employ a 
rating/ranking system like reddit that moves that stuff to the 
bottom of the thread or minimizes its presence in some way. This 
way the community can decide what they find interesting rather 
than forcing the moderators to take a much more dramatic action.