I think the idea is that the banning is a secret to the troll himself; he can post, and his posts show up on the board for him, but they don’t show up for other users. And the idea is that a troll who is told “You’re banned!” will immediately come back in some other form, while a troll who is subject to a secret ban will eventually get bored and go away.
I’m certainly not an expert on forum moderation in general, but in the particular case of this forum and community, I think this underestimates Jacek’s perspicacity and resilience.
I see your point — that could be so. Sorry if I misinterpreted in that case.
I really don’t get the preoccupation with Jacek — as trolls go, he’s mild and very easy to ignore if desired. He doesn’t (that I have seen) go nuclear and spam the community. He doesn’t try to make his voice the loudest or shout everyone else down. He just likes to be a dick about things and starts the occasional sarcastic irrelevant thread as fodder for same — big deal. I didn’t even think he was a troll at first. I have been around, and if he is this community’s idea of a ‘problem child’, we got it good.
Paul.
EDIT P.S. Even the kindest king needs a jester to keep him humble. I don’t like living in an echo chamber where everybody must think or behave as specified by the dominant faction. So I am not in favour of banning ‘trolls’ unless they are also spammers, hackers, or otherwise dedicated to denying or compromising the use of the forum.
EDIT for another P.S.: Regarding how to deal with trolls, this ‘survival guide’ is not bad. (Disclaimer: I wrote it for the scifi.com message board community back when I used to post a lot about Battlestar Galactica — now there was a community with some trolls: the fanwars over ‘GINO’ as the classic fans derisively called it, are legendary)…
Sorry, but when we have an individual whose sole purpose in posting (it would appear) is to make an ass of himself, I have trouble buying the argument that we should thank him for not making an even bigger ass of himself.
I really fail to see how “we’ve got it good” with someone who’s trolled RAIF for a decade and now seems intent on doing the same here. Whether you personally are offended by him or not, others are.
Ban his sorry ass and be done with it. No one will be sorry he’s gone.
I didn’t say anything about thanking anybody or having any gratitude. I just recommend we not mess with a system in equilibrium. It’s not actually possible to force a person remotely to stop trying to annoy you. I feel it is smarter and more realistic to guide the community’s interactions with that person to a point of benign tolerance that will generate the minimum amount of mutual provocation. (BTW a username is not a person – a person cannot actually be successfully banned from a public forum: experienced moderators know this.)
Speaking as an experienced moderator, I strongly disagree. You may not be familiar with secret bans, but they do exactly what you say is impossible: they convince people to stop trying to annoy you.
Secret/slow bans really do work, precisely because the trolls don’t know they’re banned – nobody’s replying, but they don’t know why.
It strikes me though, that all this talk of silent banning must have the effect of warning a potential troll (or orc, goblin, or indeed kobold) about the existence of such a practice, thereby somewhat undermining the intended effect. Also, I suppose there might be neurotic types who may fear that they have been banned just because nobody has responded to their post.
Further, (although I expect little sympathy on this point) I find the whole tactic a tad ethically questionable in that it encourages people to expend their creative energy fruitlessly. There’s something a little sad about the thought of the lonely troglodyte posting into the void. Whatever legitimate ill we bear someone for wasting our time, we ought not act in the same manner and actively bring about the wasting of their time. We each only have so many minutes on this Earth.
That’s silly. No one’s forcing anyone to waste their time here, trolling or otherwise. If you choose to take the time to post here, that’s your decision. If others choose to ignore you, that’s their decision. Presumably if your “creative” effort has any merit, it will get some positive response; otherwise, it deserves obscurity. Hell, if you decide to take the time to write IF at all, or help others write it, that’s your decision, and I’d call such action far more “creative” than trolling. It takes no imagination to taunt and bully. Even a dog will seek negative attention when it’s bored. (And as with humans, the proper response is not to reward the behavior with attention, nor to alternately ignore and reward – that just increases the behavior. It must be prevented, or consistently and firmly ignored, if you want it to stop.)
If you feel sorry for trolls and their craving for attention, by all means take up a private correspondence with them. But I prefer not to babysit such people. Like the default NPC, I have better things to do.
I think you slightly missed the point I was making. If someone is secretly banned, they are able to continue posting under the illusion that others can see their posts. It sets up a situation that means people are going to waste their time posting things that nobody will see. Even if we think the person’s posts are of no merit, tricking a person like that is in the very least mean-spirited. It’s not that I’m feeling sorry for anyone here, I was merely putting forward an argument against a specific moderating tactic.
I wouldn’t worry about people posting forever into a void, JJ — generally, they aren’t that stupid…
I have seen trolls dissuaded by all sorts of methods. Just because the secret ban worked on somebody, doesn’t make it ‘The Big Gun’. Personally I would figure it out pretty quick, and I think any troll worth his salt would, too. I reiterate: I believe the members of this forum are used to fighting pretty mild trolls. I offer up as evidence of this the fact that people think Jacek Pudlo is a serious issue. I can’t take him seriously — I can’t even take this conversation we are having right now about him, seriously. He is not worth going nuclear, and he is likely too smart for it to work.
Paul.
EDIT P.S.: Just now, I put five minutes of thought into how I would detect that I have been ‘secretly’ banned somewhere. It only took me those five minutes to realise that on a public forum it is actually impossible to ban anyone without them easily being able to figure out what you have done by looking at the forum when they are logged out.
You’d think that, but yet, experience shows that it works. (People don’t double check to see if they’ve been secretly banned very frequently; you can take it a little further by using cookies/IP addresses to show the thread to the secretly banned computer.)
It works especially well in combination with a “slow” ban, which is not so easily detectable.
Banning people is not a nuclear option for a moderated forum.
Instead of speculating, I invite you to ask around on other forums that have used secret bans, to see how well it’s worked in the past.
This is exactly a thing Jacek would say using one his sock puppets. I’m not saying you’re Jacek. All I’m saying is that, with people like you, Jacek doesn’t need his sock puppets.
Jacek isn’t banned so he definitely doesn’t need his sock puppets. Nor do we need to care about who are his sock puppets. What are you worried about, that someone will hack your brain and destroy your ability to judge personality when the name has changed?
If a troll uses a ‘secret’ sock puppet to post the same sorts of things as his troll account, it’s obvious and therefore not worth fretting over. If a troll uses a sock puppet to spend a portion of his finite time behaving more like a regular user rather than a dickhead – that’s an improvement and a good thing so don’t look a gift horse in the mouth by trying to nail the ‘troll’ persona to the ‘good’ account’s forehead.
The attempt to connect Adam to Jacek identity-wise was ill-advised because even if it had been correct the likeliest outcome would have been that the person behind both accounts stops splitting his efforts and starts trolling full-time.
If you prefer, I can say “Jacek has inexplicably made trolling the IF community his life’s work, and has shown willingness to assume lots of different identities to do it, so I’m not convinced that the sort of thing that works against garden-variety trolls would get him to stop instead of just channeling him to worse behavior under other names. Especially because I’ll give him enough credit to think that he’d realize what was going on.” Though I don’t know how good he is at avoiding IP blocks and the like. (Do I need to deny I’m Jacek’s sock puppet? I think if you look at my far too extensive posting history, it’ll be pretty obvious that I’m not.)
I disagree with Paul about how innocuous sock puppets are in this case, though; it takes a certain amount of attention to start ignoring a new account, and to be drawn into what seems like it might be a worthwhile conversation by someone who then peels off the mask and reveals the same old troll is even more annoying.
Fair enough. The way I parse it, there is no ‘might be a worthwhile conversation’ — either it was or it wasn’t. If something is said worth replying to and I have something I feel is interesting to say in response, then I reply without a care in the world as to who they are ‘secretly’ because I don’t feel it’s relevant. Even if they decide to reveal themselves and laugh at me for being taken in, that doesn’t remove the value I perceived in the earlier part of the conversation. That info is still there. It doesn’t upset me to be ‘pranked’ by a troll into discussing something I found interesting.
I also tend not to put anyone on ignore unless they are personally harassing me and won’t stop targetting me personally, so that’s another data point. I don’t spend any time at all deciding who to put on ignore.
Of course, that is only true for a certain type of conversation. If I spend time helpfully explaining something to you, and you then tear off your mask and joyfully shout that you knew the answer all along, I will certainly be annoyed. As I will be if I have been trying to advise, console, understand, or otherwise relate to you, and you then reveal that you didn’t mean a word of what you were saying. Some conversations are worthwhile because of the human relations involved, not because the content is inherently interesting to you.
