STL should be the troll hunter

This should go through a shareholder vote and not done unilaterally. I hope the proxy form gets to me faster than the dopp kitt ever did.

I get the differences. I’m saying that regardless of the mechanism something needs to be done and people keep holding out for a perfect solution that won’t offend anyone when the reality is people just need to pick something and go with it. It’s healthcare all over again. Everyone agree’s something needs to change but nobody will do anything until we eventually just bite the bullet and whip something out.

So it sounds like the policy should be about repeated postings of pointless threads. If a user posts something meaningless once in a while, we can say he or she just missed the mark and choose not to read it as t falls down the stack.

If a user posts 3 or more in a short interval like a day or two, they should get a warning, and if they continue, then a ban or a throttle before a ban.

A voting system thumbs up thumbs down would also be a good way to do this, but the tech guys have been dragging their feet on this for so long that I’m assuming they either can’t or don’t want to do it for reasons they are afraid or embarrassed to say.

What constitutes meaningless is going to be subjective and many people aren’t going to like it.

I do nuke crazy threads now and then when a poster seems prone to post a lot of junk. But I often hold off because even though the initial post is dumb, often times the responses aren’t, or the thread goes off in another direction which is interesting. When that happens, I don’t like nuking the thread, and that’s why I often leave them up.

Finally, this is a problem that flares up now and then, it’s not necessarily a constant one. It does seem that a lot of the wacky stuff comes from India, though kuromusha was from Australia and seemed more East Asian in style. I’m often not sure at the beginning if what’s going wrong is based on cluelessness or deliberate trolling so it takes some time to watch and decide. It tends to take a day or two to spot someone, another day or two to try to get them to calm down and then another day or two to decide to ban them. So it takes about a week or sometimes a little longer.

So far it’s something that flares up now and then, but the flare ups have been coming more frequently. I suspect it’s that our user base is getting younger and younger and coming from less professionalized backgrounds, or maybe it’s that is old-timers are getting long in the tooth, crotchety, and less patient with stupid crap. Heck, CvM no longer wants to “smash dimes” anymore. What’s next for us, knitting? :wink:

Don’t know that this will work. Trolls tend to fight each other and it clutters up the boards.

My solution–create a “Janitor’s Closet”. That is, anybody and everybody gathers at the Water Cooler. You can’t stop people from going to the Water Cooler, but in order to get into the Janitor’s Closet and get in on the cool conversations, you have to actually be invited.

So make a person (or group of people) the “invitees”, and in order to post in the Janitor’s Closet, you have to be invited.

^Sounds creepy. Can I come?

Not sure you’d like it; there’s no bidet.

Or alternatively the junk threads from WC could be moved to the dirt … the Janior’s Closet … venture there if you dare. It would be like getting put in the corner for serial junk posters - their threads would just end up in the humiliating Janitor’s Closet. Or you could entitle it the “Pink Sheets” as they have much lower potential than the regular threads.

Make another WC, this time call it Water Closet. We can keep all the undesirables there