On Fri, 23 Oct 2015 18:12:03 +0200, Richard Brown wrote:
I'm afraid I don't have the forum posts to hand which also fit this trend, including arguments with their Forum administrators - I understand the Forum team may have tidied up a lot of those posts.
That is correct, Richard. It is standard practice in the forums to deal with threads where fighting occurs (whether it's between members or between members and forum staff). Our audience in the forums tends to run more towards end-users, so we tend to enforce a community standard that's less like the rough-and- tumble of development mailing lists and more like a user-to-user support forum. Being friendly to new users who don't come from a technology background is a primary goal there - and the directness that some (or even many) technical people use in their written communications comes across as being mean or overly blunt. As such, specific forum examples are tricky to locate, because they would need to walk that line between being problematic enough to mention, but not problematic enough to have been deleted. I personally end up dealing with a fair number of the forum issues where Carlos is one of the participants, and often, the result of my dealing with those issues is direct interaction with Carlos. Richard's observation of Carlos' frequent "content-free" responses is something the forums staff are very familiar with. I can't even begin to list the number of times I've seen Carlos reply to threads with responses that had all the appearances of being simply intended to drive a post counter up. Replies that add substantially no new information to an ongoing discussion, duplicate points already made, and so on - sometimes hours after the point's already been made. Another frequent distraction that he brings to help threads is nit- picking rare edge cases of general statements made by participants in the thread. Sometimes, it is useful to bring those up, but not nearly as frequently as happens. We've had forum members often express their frustration (by reporting posts) with Carlos' derailing of threads with unimportant trivia. To be fair, the number of times that we've had to deal with Carlos' behavior in the forums has put some of the staff on something of a hair trigger with anything he says. As a forum administrator, I see it as part of my job to make sure those discussions stay grounded and ask the question "if this was anyone else, would we be having this discussion?" - and I take that responsibility very seriously. Sometimes the answer is "no, we wouldn't". Sometimes the answer is "yes, we would". Sometimes the answer is "it depends on if we'd had problems like this with the user before". We take banning users very seriously, and other than spammers (who earn an instant permanent ban), we've only had occasion to apply a permanent ban on two occasions that I can think of - and then, only after very long and careful deliberation that it's the right course of action, along with a proviso that if the users in question agree to follow the rules (knowing that we'll be watching closely), they can come back; so even then, "permanent" doesn't have to be. Temporary bans are more frequent (maybe one every 2-3 months) - usually for a period of two weeks as a "cooling off" period. Sometimes longer if it's a repeat offense, or shorter if the user is really new and is just not responding to the usual guidance we provide for them to be a productive contributor. We don't always handle it perfectly (we are human, after all), but we do our best to try to make the forums a welcoming place for everyone who is serious about participating. The challenge for any moderation team is finding the right balance when a user becomes problematic, and usually, that kind of situation leads to the potential for people on the sidelines feeling the need to engage in "rules lawyering" and second-guessing those who have stepped up to manage the community and ensure the standards of the community are being followed. Jim -- Jim Henderson Please keep on-topic replies on the list so everyone benefits -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org