Is Countertrolling a Troll The Answer

[Roadgeekteen]

(If I had my druthers, we could just mark certain threads invisible to the "recent posts" views, so someone could post ten thousand times and nobody would be any the wiser unless they picked that specific thread from the board listing. That probably wouldn't be too hard to code an extension for, but I'm not quite confident enough in my abilities to give it a try.)

This would be my ideal solution in a perfect world where bugs weren't a thing - I can definitely understand the concern for adverse affects. I'm in the "stop feeding" camp, and really my biggest gripe at this point is the universe thread clogging up the recent posts list (and more often than not, any other threads on the list are derailed threads such as that hotel one).

Can't you just hide post notifications from a specific topic? Am I the only one who doesn't use the recent posts function all that much?

[hotdogPi]

The hotel thread was not derailed. The rants were on-topic to the intent of the thread.

[webny99]

Am I the only one who doesn't use the recent posts function all that much?

No. I almost always browse by board. I know there's new post in that board when the little arrow next to it turns green.

[hotdogPi]

My "home page" (although I don't have my browser set to it as a home page) is Recent Unread Topics, so they show up, but they don't obscure the other unread topics.

[Roadgeekteen]

I normally first go through show new replies to your posts, and then when I'm done I check out show unread posts since last visit.

[formulanone]

I normally first go through show new replies to your posts, and then when I'm done I check out show unread posts since last visit.

Yeah, me too. The problem is that once you've posted anything, it appears in that feed forever (or until one's post is deleted or thread is viewed after it's locked). So I use that as a deterrent from posting in a thread if I don't feel passionate about it enough...

I'll pick through boards if I'm curious about something out of my area or just use Search.

[vdeane]

All of us, as the group of forum users, have a fourth option:  Ignore it and don't respond at all.  I've mentioned that before.  Stop picking at a wound and it will soon go away.

https://xkcd.com/386/

Am I the only one who doesn't use the recent posts function all that much?

No. I almost always browse by board. I know there's new post in that board when the little arrow next to it turns green.

I browse board by board to start, queuing up all the threads with new posts I'm interested in at once (two rounds, first the general boards, then the regional ones and OT), then use the recent posts view to catch anything that came in since the round started, so I don't miss anything once I hit "mark all messages as read".

[Max Rockatansky]

The hotel thread was not derailed. The rants were on-topic to the intent of the thread.

I took that thread more to be a complaint fest from the word go. 

[Roadgeekteen]

The hotel thread was not derailed. The rants were on-topic to the intent of the thread.

I took that thread more to be a complaint fest from the word go.

And MMM wasn't the creator. Geek11111, who is like the calm version of MMM, started the thread.

[GaryV]

Sometimes it's just fun to reply to something ludicrous and point out the fallacy of the ideas, just to see what the poster will do to torture logic again.

[Max Rockatansky]

The hotel thread was not derailed. The rants were on-topic to the intent of the thread.

I took that thread more to be a complaint fest from the word go.

And MMM wasn't the creator. Geek11111, who is like the calm version of MMM, started the thread.

And also the author of such famous quotes as "sssssss."

[kalvado]

The hotel thread was not derailed. The rants were on-topic to the intent of the thread.

I took that thread more to be a complaint fest from the word go.

Hotel thread discusses a real underlying issue. It may be of limited interest to general AAroad audience, though, but overall question is 100% legit.
Again, you may need to make up your mind - are you interested  enough to participate in discussion or you want to walk away from that? SHouldn't be an issue for responsible adult. IMHO.
For me personally, opinion of today's youth  about medical decisions going one way or the other is of some fringe interest, so I did read that part. It was fairly educative to see it between MMM and RGT. 
What made you comment there, though? 

[Max Rockatansky]

The hotel thread was not derailed. The rants were on-topic to the intent of the thread.

I took that thread more to be a complaint fest from the word go.

Hotel thread discusses a real underlying issue. It may be of limited interest to general AAroad audience, though, but overall question is 100% legit.
Again, you may need to make up your mind - are you interested  enough to participate in discussion or you want to walk away from that? SHouldn't be an issue for responsible adult. IMHO.
For me personally, opinion of today's youth  about medical decisions going one way or the other is of some fringe interest, so I did read that part. It was fairly educative to see it between MMM and RGT. 
What made you comment there, though?

For me, I was very much interested in discussing the topic.  Despite MMM's initial post and my suspicions that he would train wreck the thread I shared some of my legit thoughts/experiences.   Trouble is that the thread turned into "won't be someone think of the children"  fast and went off the deep end.

[Roadgeekteen]

The hotel thread was not derailed. The rants were on-topic to the intent of the thread.

I took that thread more to be a complaint fest from the word go.

Hotel thread discusses a real underlying issue. It may be of limited interest to general AAroad audience, though, but overall question is 100% legit.
Again, you may need to make up your mind - are you interested  enough to participate in discussion or you want to walk away from that? SHouldn't be an issue for responsible adult. IMHO.
For me personally, opinion of today's youth  about medical decisions going one way or the other is of some fringe interest, so I did read that part. It was fairly educative to see it between MMM and RGT. 
What made you comment there, though?

For me, I was very much interested in discussing the topic.  Despite MMM's initial post and my suspicions that he would train wreck the thread I shared some of my legit thoughts/experiences.   Trouble is that the thread turned into "won't be someone think of the children"  fast and went off the deep end.

There was interesting thoughts in that thread. But MMM's posts have so much stuff in them that's just repeating himself over and over, it's like it's so hard to distinguish the unique content with just the stuff we've seen over and over again. And MMM is stubborn and won't listen to anyone else, and is not open to changing his mind.

[kalvado]

The hotel thread was not derailed. The rants were on-topic to the intent of the thread.

I took that thread more to be a complaint fest from the word go.

Hotel thread discusses a real underlying issue. It may be of limited interest to general AAroad audience, though, but overall question is 100% legit.
Again, you may need to make up your mind - are you interested  enough to participate in discussion or you want to walk away from that? SHouldn't be an issue for responsible adult. IMHO.
For me personally, opinion of today's youth  about medical decisions going one way or the other is of some fringe interest, so I did read that part. It was fairly educative to see it between MMM and RGT. 
What made you comment there, though?

For me, I was very much interested in discussing the topic.  Despite MMM's initial post and my suspicions that he would train wreck the thread I shared some of my legit thoughts/experiences.   Trouble is that the thread turned into "won't be someone think of the children"  fast and went off the deep end.

So looks like MMM managed to mix too much drama into a good one he brought up. WEll, walk away  once things get ugly. I, for one, do that once connectivity issues degrade into route number assignments, for example

[roadman65]

I didn't realize how popular this would become since I asked the question.

They could have been numbered in order by length - several states did that with their highway system. It wouldn't change where the Interstates went.

I suggest that the original US Highway grid system was to avoid disputes. "Why do they get XX, our state is more important." Even so, there were complaints about some routes, like US 60. Since there never was any kind of unified system before, they chose to come up with a grid.

Then when the Interstate system came about, the easiest way to avoid duplicate numbers in the same state was to use a grid, but reverse the order of the numbers. And leave out I-50 and I-60 because they didn't need as many e/w routes as n/s.

They could have been numbered in order by length - several states did that with their highway system. It wouldn't change where the Interstates went.

I suggest that the original US Highway grid system was to avoid disputes. "Why do they get XX, our state is more important." Even so, there were complaints about some routes, like US 60. Since there never was any kind of unified system before, they chose to come up with a grid.

Then when the Interstate system came about, the easiest way to avoid duplicate numbers in the same state was to use a grid, but reverse the order of the numbers. And leave out I-50 and I-60 because they didn't need as many e/w routes as n/s.

I think the Interstate highway numbering scheme came first, because it's the one that makes more sense. People read and write left to right, so it makes sense to increase them in number from west to east. Also, "lower" altitudes should have "lower numbers" so it makes sense to increase south to north even though people dint write that way. Making the even numbers east-west and the odd numbers also makes perfect sense because "EvEn" has Es just like East and west. "Odd" has Os in North and south.South. since route numbering works exactly the opposite in direction, andthats only because they didn't want interstates and routes near each other, shows the interstate numbers came first.1

By seeing stuff like this post, does, I know, make it hard to ignore, but maybe we should try at least.  Because the more you try to educate this guy, he'll be more ridiculous with counterposts to make us respond again and it continues back and forth. And it will never stop.

Plus his head is made of concrete and nothing gets through to him. He is lost and we'll never get through to him.  He is not well and admits to possibly having skitso ( don't know how to spell it and spell check is being anal and won't produce suggestions) so this guy is problem City.

IMO we should try to ignore this guy and he will get tired and very well rage quit. 

[J N Winkler]

I've noticed a trend over the years where someone comes along and engages in similar behavior to MMM.  Every time said person gets the axe they are quickly replaced by someone else who the same thing anew. 

I haven't quite come to my own conclusion if this is just something endemic to the road community.  I occasionally see like behavior in other road groups but it is often swept away fairly quickly due to social media platforms usually having more authoritarian moderation.  In the groups I manage/admin someone who acts as MMM does probably wouldn't make it a week on average.

Every online community has problem members--this is just the normal distribution in operation.  But because facts falling into rich, complex patterns lie at the heart of the road hobby, I also think it has a particularly strong appeal to neurodiverse individuals, and so the dysfunction we often see differs in that regard from what one might encounter on, say, Web forums dedicated to writing or knitting.

In the past I've helped moderate SABRE (our British counterpart), which has had problems similar to ours.  There are also Web forums dedicated to roads based in France (SARA) and the Dutch/Flemish-speaking area (WegenForum), and although I have not joined either (I am not fluent in either French or Dutch, and feel leery about posting in English or inflicting machine translation on native speakers), I would be shocked if they have avoided these challenges.

Facebook groups tend to have a take-no-prisoners approach to moderation since the incentives are different.  Facebook itself pimps groups, so there is a steady conveyor belt bringing in new members.  It also affords moderators little autonomy since it holds group admins liable for breaches of the TOS.  The flat structure for organizing content (posts with attached comments in an endless spool, rather than boards with topics that in turn have posts) impairs information accessibility, leading to topic churn.  The sense of being part of a community erodes as member population increases to the point of unwieldiness.  Both feed member disengagement.  Just this morning the admin of the Freeways in LA Facebook group posted to say that new member introductions are now limited to weekly threads, as with 22,000 members, the group is now so large it has become unmanageable for each new member to take a post to introduce himself or herself.

It has reached the point where I post in groups only infrequently.  I tend to join, often intending to unfollow more or less immediately, primarily to maintain passive access to information in past posts through the search mechanism.

Personally I'm not a fan of ignoring stuff and hoping it goes away.  My observation is that said tact just encourages the problem people to fester.  Crash_It is probably the most recent and extreme example of someone where ignoring them didn't work.

I agree there is a strong case for intervention, but (speaking on my own behalf, and not for the moderating team as a whole) I think we need to be very careful to keep strategic aims in view.  We do have a history of initial behavioral outliers growing into valued members of the community.  We also don't necessarily want to build a new tool for dealing with annoying newbies, find that it works really well, and then have it turn into the hammer looking for nails to hit.

[Max Rockatansky]

That update on Freeways of Los Angeles this morning made me do a double take.  That's one of the strictest Facebook groups I'm a member of.  I know some of the backstory of how things got how they are on this group but I have to wonder how tenable it will be now long term. 

Don't get me wrong, I like the admin of the Freeways or Los Angeles page.  He did ask me to post more fairly recently when I was speaking with him on a group call.  I didn't want to tell him the reason I don't is because all the posts by group members have to be approved and it takes to long for my tastes. 

[Roadgeekteen]

Heh, I remember when I was the annoying newbie and I even had some threads in this board created about me. It caused a huge new debate about fictional highways. Than an even stranger member joined a few months afterwards and behaved even more bizzare. We both are somehow still on the forum and have cleaned up significantly. But that's honestly the minority of annoying members. Most flame out.

[Scott5114]

I believe they were put in place due to Tolbs. Don't think they've been used ever since.

The second part of your belief is incorrect.

[Roadgeekteen]

I believe they were put in place due to Tolbs. Don't think they've been used ever since.

The second part of your belief is incorrect.

Huh, I might be mistaken. I haven't been very active on the forum for the entire time since then, so I may have missed some incident.

[Scott5114]

I believe they were put in place due to Tolbs. Don't think they've been used ever since.

The second part of your belief is incorrect.

Huh, I might be mistaken. I haven't been very active on the forum for the entire time since then, so I may have missed some incident.

We don't announce every moderation activity we do. In fact, not every application of the rules even comes down to using the moderation tools. Sometimes it's as simple as sending a longtime regular a PM saying "Hey, just so you know, the rules say X" and they reply "Whoops, I won't do that anymore then" and then they don't. Nobody but the affected user knows when we do that, which is of course why we do it–no need to publicly call someone out if there's no need.

Heck, even when we do implement a solution using the mod tools, you may not notice. Sometimes the result of that is the user makes a good faith effort to change their behavior. Or they simply leave the forum. Again, we don't really call attention to it, because moderation action is really nobody's business but the mods' and the affected user. There's no need to embarrass a user if they're making a good faith attempt to contribute and just need some guidance.

So don't assume that you have the full picture from what you can see publicly, even if you read 100% of the posts on the forum (which even I don't do).

[Roadgeekteen]

I believe they were put in place due to Tolbs. Don't think they've been used ever since.

The second part of your belief is incorrect.

Huh, I might be mistaken. I haven't been very active on the forum for the entire time since then, so I may have missed some incident. 

We don't announce every moderation activity we do. In fact, not every application of the rules even comes down to using the moderation tools. Sometimes it's as simple as sending a longtime regular a PM saying "Hey, just so you know, the rules say X" and they reply "Whoops, I won't do that anymore then" and then they don't. Nobody but the affected user knows when we do that, which is of course why we do it–no need to publicly call someone out if there's no need.

Heck, even when we do implement a solution using the mod tools, you may not notice. Sometimes the result of that is the user makes a good faith effort to change their behavior. Or they simply leave the forum. Again, we don't really call attention to it, because moderation action is really nobody's business but the mods' and the affected user. There's no need to embarrass a user if they're making a good faith attempt to contribute and just need some guidance.

So don't assume that you have the full picture from what you can see publicly, even if you read 100% of the posts on the forum (which even I don't do).

Yeah, I understand. I know that another forum, the alternate history forum, that I am on, has every mod decision in one gigantic thread for transparency reasons. So you can see all banned users and why they were banned. I can see pros and cons to that approach.

[Scott5114]

Wikipedia is extremely transparent in its governance, and my experience in that environment is part of the reason why I try to be discreet in enforcement. (The other is experience in the workforce–the management axiom of "praise in public, criticize in private" is a good one if you value allowing people to save face.)

[roadman65]

Has anyone tried the ignore user feature? It lets you ignore people you put on the list. I've used it with other users and their posts show up with an ignore mention.  Instead of the content it reminds you that you have chosen to ignore them but you can click on the blue show me the post if you want to override the block.