Trolling and trash talk are two very different things. Trash talking is for actually playing the game. Trolling is for morons in the internet. Did you REALLY just make a Web 2.0 reference? That's funny. So you need a lot of moderating to keep the site running but aren't concerned about the user experience deteriorating as related to other posters. Like I said, nice work. You happened to get lucky that this was the message board that the Blazers community moved to randomly one day. To think that it had something to do with how you ran the board is pretty funny. There is nothing making your board different than the other message boards. We left the other board because the user experience had deteriorated due to lame posters. Nobody gives a rats ass about features and layout.
Your enjoyment of his opinions and interactions with Blazer fans is readily apparent, stating the obvious really. I'll try this again. This is a community forum, it is an assembly for the open discussion of subjects of common interest, in the Blazer boards case the discussion of the Portland Trailblazers. By starting a thread or making a post on the forum you are opening up lines of discussion for the entire community. Mixum posted: The simplest answer to the question posed by MIXUM himself is that the forum setting isn't intended for this, it's intended for the entire community to discuss topics. If someone wants to speak with a subset of that community then they should use other tools of which we are readily supplied with on this site thanks to Denny's continued work. Starting a blog to voice his opinions and inviting the subset of the community he wanted to read and respond to those opinions is one of the only plausible scenarios to achieve the goal posed by his question.
For everyone's benefit: (From wikipedia) I've posted in our staff forums about radical trust more times than I can count. It's why we don't move your threads, why we let you pretty much post what you want, we don't ban people, and so on. User-centered design - it's why we let you elect your own moderators and why I talk about it's about you posters, not the staff (see my previous post). The collective intelligence bit is about you complaining about another poster and other people backing that poster, and being able to be open and having the freedom to do so. So yeah, I made a Web 2.0 reference. What of it?
MIXUM > People complaining about MIXUM you guys have a low threshold for "trolling" I guess. Its more that you can't use a reply to change or challenge his actual thoughts, so you throw out "HE'S A TROLL!". j.f.c.
It's funny because it is a term that marketing posers like to use to show how neat and hip they are. Anyway, it is clear that a certain poster is deteriorating the user experience for many other posters. It is your message board, so obviously you can do what you want. It isn't a huge deal, it just makes this forum less appealing to most posters. If you won't ban trolls, just make that explicitly clear to all posters. Then everybody can drop it and use some other means to try to form the user experience they desire.
Not really. That's the issue is when people actually respond with solid, reasoned arguments, he ignores the thread, or ignores the post and continues on with his previous attempts to be inflammatory or contrary. He complained all last season about needing to get rid of Outlaw and Blake for someone like Camby. And then leads off this season by complaining about not having Outlaw and Blake. He hated on Martell and laughed at his ability to be an NBA player. And then he played well, and he was mocking Batum. Etc. He's not here to have a normal Blazers discourse. It's not the inability of people to challenge what he says. It's that he writes shit to get a rise out of people, and, basically, troll. If he wanted Blazers conversation, like many others, then he'd actually respond to posts that debate his points in well thought out manners. He doesn't.
the real problem with banning "obvious trolls" is that this place gets less fun because then there is censorship and becomes more moderator-oriented. Just because a poster is thick in the head isn't a real reason to ban him, hypothetically speaking of course.
I agree it's a marketing thing for many, but for others it's very real. It's a difficult thing to define, but there are clear aspects to it that have nothing to do with marketing. I've enumerated a few in my previous post. A certain poster sent me a PM today, asking my advice. He asked me if I thought he should stop posting, post less, post as if he had rose colored glasses, or what. Given that Web 2.0 freedom to post what he wants, he's earned his reputation (collective intelligence) among his peers. It's looking to me like there's an alternative to an outright ban. He reached out to me, it wasn't some sort of confrontation between staff and a poster. You guys are having the effect you want, it seems.
That's a fine stance to have. It should just be made explicitly clear that trolls won't be banned. Then users can take that information and do what they like with it.
Buy a banner ad on the site stating so. If Denny snuck it into the TOS when registering, would anyone really give a shit?
I think posters could move forward more effectively if you just stated explicitly that trolls won't be banned. Then other users can use that information to decide what to do next. They can leave the forum, try a more concerted effort to have everybody ignore trolls, etc, etc.
I think there's a difference between being stubborn/thick in the head vs. being a troll. Mixum probably thinks like he does, I don't find anything wrong with it.
Justice William Brennan once wrote that "One man's pornography is another man's art." It appears to me that maybe half the posters think he's a troll (pornography) and half like his posting (art). I have no idea why anyone would respond to his threads and posts otherwise. How do you expect me to judge this kind of thing? Because you say so, or because another poster says not? On what scale is he making the site less fun for you? On a scale of 1 to 100, maybe 100? If so, where do we set the limit where we ban people for posting unpopular posts? And how do we measure it on that scale of 1 to 100?
I have an idea: give him an entire subf-orum. Hell, give him a blog! But don't let him post on the Blazers forum more than once a day. NIMBY.
Everyone can have their own blog here at S2. http://sportstwo.com/blog.php I would love to let Mixum have his own thread to post in if he's willing. It's worked for other posters on certain topics before.
