Trolling or freedom of expression?

[Jon12345]

Sorry to hear you had a stroke. I think I get what you mean now. You are saying all options are open! Yes, I understand that. My position is a little different in that I agree with 2 out of 3 things you said. I just don't want to ban someone permanently.

On another forum recently, I said this:



A long time poster on that site said this:



They thought I was a spammer. Spammers normally get lifetime bans. If this person was a mod, I would probably have gotten a lifetime ban. Is that fair? Someones subjective interpretation of my motivations behind posting a message, which were wrong, would lead to lifetime exclusion.

This is the problem with perma-bans. It is like hanging the innocent with no way to make amends.

 

[Kirby]

Who said perma-bans can't be reversed in case they were wrong? Yes, it can happen that a post/user appears as a spammer and thus gets banned.

If this is wrong and the user does care he will complain; if not he doesn't care anyway so it's not a big loss.

 

[Jon12345]

How does he complain when his ip is banned?

 

[alexm]

What if 20 users were going to suffer if one user, despite multiple attempts to get him to behave, didn't?

Sometimes banning someone makes him think 'oh, he's serious '... and then he makes another login and behaves. You know it's him again but you let it slide. Everyone's happy!

Sometimes banning the worst behaved is enough to get the rest of them to calm down.

There's lots of potential reasons to and, as @Kirby said, you can alway un-ban him.

 

[alexm]

How does he complain when his ip is banned?

Via email link

Edit: oops, you banned his IP... it's quite easy to get a new IP too though

 

[Jon12345]

I say...

• All 20 have the power to block that user and never see their posts.
• Is it volume of suffering or intensity? Let's say all 20 were a little irked by the troll, yet the troll was devastated by a ban? What then?
• How do you decide what is good behaviour? Some people think wearing a Mexican hat is cultural appropriation and therefore offensive. Others say it is just a fancy dress party, anything goes.

The troll in question...he was banned on Wednesday, and the mods are already getting paranoid! There was a bit of a testy thread going by a relatively new member - they signed up last week - who is complaining that the advice at my forum is negative as is the attitude. There is a reasonably high probability it is our own highly skilled super-troll! One of my arguments is that you can ban a trolls username but they will come back. You think you can spot them? If they are smart, they will adapt and use alternative ways to wind up members. Then, all those members who blocked that trolls previous username, get to see his new threads. So, I say let the troll live and breath, block them and live your life peacefully. But I feel there is some morbid fascination by many members who feel compelled to read what he has to say. They only have themselves to blame.

 

[Jon12345]

Via email link

Edit: oops, you banned his IP... it's quite easy to get a new IP too though

To be clear, we are talking hypothetical here. Yes, if you are a techie guy like me, I can set up VPNs etc. But most people are not techie. They wouldn't have a clue.

 

[Kirby]

How does he complain when his ip is banned?

Via Contact-Form, E-Mail, Fax or Phone?

 

[Jon12345]

Via Contact-Form, E-Mail, Fax or Phone?

That is possible in some cases. But they were also banned based on their post content. The post content hasn't changed.

 

[alexm]

I say...

• All 20 have the power to block that user and never see their posts.
• Is it volume of suffering or intensity? Let's say all 20 were a little irked by the troll, yet the troll was devastated by a ban? What then?
• How do you decide what is good behaviour? Some people think wearing a Mexican hat is cultural appropriation and therefore offensive. Others say it is just a fancy dress party, anything goes.

The troll in question...he was banned on Wednesday, and the mods are already getting paranoid! There was a bit of a testy thread going by a relatively new member - they signed up last week - who is complaining that the advice at my forum is negative as is the attitude. There is a reasonably high probability it is our own highly skilled super-troll! One of my arguments is that you can ban a trolls username but they will come back. You think you can spot them? If they are smart, they will adapt and use alternative ways to wind up members. Then, all those members who blocked that trolls previous username, get to see his new threads. So, I say let the troll live and breath, block them and live your life peacefully. But I feel there is some morbid fascination by many members who feel compelled to read what he has to say. They only have themselves to blame.

There's loads of differences between technical ability, humour (or lack of), people who take it serious and people it's just a laugh to... that's why, in my opinion, you need all 3 approaches

But, at the end of the day you're the owner so what you say goes.

 

[jmurrayhead]

@Jon12345 Have you considered possibly using an add-on like ThemeHouse's Force Ignore? "This add-on adds a section to the Admin Control Panel where administrators can enter the names of two users and force those users to ignore each other. " This might solve some of your problems. Anyone who has an issue with this user - you can make them ignore each other. Maybe eventually this user will be ignored by so many people that they decide to leave on their own.

 

[Jon12345]

@jmurrayhead That is a very interesting idea and clever add-on. My only issue is that I have members saying they don't want to block the troll because they want to defend themselves if the troll says anything negative about them in a thread. I find that response very frustrating. It is like there is a solution within my grasp!

No one has tried yet to guess who should have gotten banned. Member A or Member B? Come on, play the game!!

Someone likened him to a bad date that you can't get rid of.

 

[alexm]

@Jon12345 Have you considered possibly using an add-on like ThemeHouse's Force Ignore? "This add-on adds a section to the Admin Control Panel where administrators can enter the names of two users and force those users to ignore each other. " This might solve some of your problems. Anyone who has an issue with this user - you can make them ignore each other. Maybe eventually this user will be ignored by so many people that they decide to leave on their own.

Over the years I've tried the solution where you've got person A and person B and you add them both to ignore and I found it didn't work. You'd get them wondering what person C was talking about and then, eventually, what A was saying about B and log out to read what he wrote etc. But that's just what I found.

 

[Jon12345]

Curiosity killed the cat.

 

[jmurrayhead]

That is a very interesting idea and clever add-on. My only issue is that I have members saying they don't want to block the troll because they want to defend themselves if the troll says anything negative about them in a thread. I find that response very frustrating. It is like there is a solution within my grasp!

When members feel they need to defend themselves...I dunno, that sounds like a whole other problem. In that case, the person on assault may need a timeout for a while.

Over the years I've tried the solution where you've got person A and person B and you add them both to ignore and I found it didn't work. You'd get them wondering what person C was talking about and then, eventually, what A was saying about B and log out to read what he wrote etc. But that's just what I found.

That's reasonable. If only there was proper blocking in XenForo. Then again, members might just log out and view the thread's full content (if it's publicly available).

 

[Jon12345]

The super-troll is very clever though. He rides that line where it is not 100% offensive but still gets under peoples skin. For example, he keeps referring to one of the members as grandpa. He is a grandpa. He says, "I always have a great deal of respect for the older members." The guy he is referring to is 72. Is that rude? It depends on what you think he is getting at! You see, it is that fine line that he surfs.

 

[jmurrayhead]

The super-troll is very clever though. He rides that line where it is not 100% offensive but still gets under peoples skin. For example, he keeps referring to one of the members as grandpa. He is a grandpa. He says, "I always have a great deal of respect for the older members." The guy he is referring to is 72. Is that rude? It depends on what you think he is getting at! You see, it is that fine line that he surfs.

Maybe more context is needed to determine if it's rude or not. Have you provided this member with proper warnings about conduct? It's ok to have an opinion, but to attack members passive aggressively or not shouldn't be tolerated. Maybe put this member as 'Discouraged User' in the Admin CP to cool them down a bit.

 

[Jon12345]

The context is he drives my members nuts! It often ends up that the target of the trolling reacts far worse than the subtleness of the troll themselves. So what do you do then, when the reacting party is far more abusive than fine line trolls? Is it trolling or just banter, just lighthearted fun?

I did come across the Discouraged User thing today. I thought that was a clever idea. I've put a Thumbs Down like on my forum. I thought that would give a bit of fun for members to react to the troll. Perhaps a cumulative thumbs down count could auto increase the delays in the discouraged user settings. That would be a nice feature.

 

[jmurrayhead]

The context is he drives my members nuts! It often ends up that the target of the trolling reacts far worse than the subtleness of the troll themselves. So what do you do then, when the reacting party is far more abusive than fine line trolls? Is it trolling or just banter, just lighthearted fun?

I did come across the Discouraged User thing today. I thought that was a clever idea. I've put a Thumbs Down like on my forum. I thought that would give a bit of fun for members to react to the troll. Perhaps a cumulative thumbs down count could auto increase the delays in the discouraged user settings. That would be a nice feature.

Indeed. Reading various responses in this thread has been a little enlightening. I don't think any one of them is wrong, it's just a matter of how you want to run your forum. Something I take issue with is that it seems your moderators are reacting to this personally rather than how they should be as staff of your forum. That makes the situation a bit different.

Now, your idea about cumulative thumbs down increasing the delays for the discouraged user sounds nice in theory, but if they know that's what is happening, would heavily be abused given what you've revealed about your community.

Let me ask you this, do you think this member will ever change? If you're willing to have a community discourage vote, it's essentially the same as banning them. Because they will thumbs down every post of this user until the end of time. If there is no hope for improvement, despite what your morals may be, the better interests of the community might have to come into play with a ban.

 

[PatM]

In general, the forum owner decides on the general direction of the rules but if you don't want to drive away your staff, it's a good idea to take their opinions into account. On our forum, if we arrived at the conclusion that a person was knowingly pushing people's buttons on a persistent basis, he/she would receive a warning (as in a PM from staff) and then increasing periods of ban. In general, negative comments on people's characters aren't welcome and members are discouraged from doing that. Freedom of speech can't be used as an excuse to enter personal boundaries for the purpose of getting under people's skins. Our forum has an appeals section for banned members where they can post, so if they're mistakenly banned for any reason, it's easy to reverse the decision.