On Forum Moderation

[bachmeier]

On Tuesday, 22 October 2019 at 20:01:54 UTC, Jonathan Marler 
wrote:
> 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.

My standard (that I provided in my earlier post in this thread) 
is to get rid of off-topic posts. The person that led to this 
discussion will post lengthy commentary about how D won't succeed 
because of [fill in one of many complaints] in a thread on almost 
any topic. It's impossible to know why he posts that stuff, but 
it sure seems to be a desire to vandalize discussions so that 
outsiders will stay away from the language. That's off-topic. 
Nobody else should have to read it or respond to it, and nobody 
should see it when Google brings them here. There's no right to 
derail conversations.