Adapting your story to the limitations of the medium

[Jamespking (Marco Innocenti)]

Well, my bad. I didn’t know the full story, should have trusted others’ experience.

[climbingstars]

Thanks for the explanations. Clearly, we have some ace detectives here!

@Peter Pears

climbingstars, while what he said about people with disorders is sensible out of context, in context it was a patronising criticism of the mods, in a writing style that is too close to Pudlo for comfort.

The Galatea thing I didn’t see so much. But I haven’t known Pudlo for as long as others.

I didn’t see that one coming! Now my first post seems like a fish out of water!

@matt w

The thing in this thread is that Emily Short’s Galatea is not an adaptation of Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2, no one could possibly think so, anyone who says so is trolling, and the odds are pretty good that someone who shows up and starts trolling about Galatea is Pudlo.

Well, I’m not that familiar with Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2 so I wouldn’t be able to say either way. I’d say that Galatea is based on the Pygmalion and Galatea story in Greek Mythology, especially as it involves a statue.

[zarf (Andrew Plotkin)]

Well, this was the last thread he de-railed, hopefully

It’s not a derail if you start the thread with the intent of trolling.

Anyway, I repeat my earlier preference for throwing posts (or threads) into a dungeon rather than deleting them. We now have a bunch of people talking to air – or ganging up on air – and it’s impossible for a new viewer to tell what happened.

(Alternatives: moderators hide blocked posts in some way to defuse troll-potential while still leaving them accessible to history. Spoiler-tag, rot13, and deleting vowels are all ways of doing this.)

[Peter_Piers1 (Peter Piers)]

It’s not a derail if you start the thread with the intent of trolling.

Oh, that’s right, I actually forgot he started the thread.

[matt_weiner (matt w)]

@zarf

Anyway, I repeat my earlier preference for throwing posts (or threads) into a dungeon rather than deleting them. We now have a bunch of people talking to air – or ganging up on air – and it’s impossible for a new viewer to tell what happened.

I can still see all pete’s posts, though, except for the first one which got deleted by accident.

[zarf (Andrew Plotkin)]

Oh, hm. You’re right.

Okay, then, I repeat my support for the excellent policy of not deleting posts.

[Wotan]

@Peter Pears

@matt w

DavidK, I suspect you can just go ahead and delete the account again, as this is surely Jacek Pudlo. (The Galatea joke gives it away.)

I wouldn’t want to commit, but if anything struck me as Pudlo-esque at all in this person’s posts, it was the ridicule towards the mod, and the demeaning, patronising way it was done.

I think we are just overreacting to past scars. I knew it was going to happen. Just wait for some evidence.

No really, I saw this happen far too often on RAIF – someone shows up talking apparently sensibly but a little off, you try to engage them in conversation, and then after a little bit the mask slips and you get the outright trolling. Usually with some kind of slam at Emily Short, though Adam Cadre and Andrew Plotkin and a few others can be targeted. And huzzah! you’ve wasted your time dealing with Jacek as though he were a human being.

It’s not really overreaction to past scars, it’s inference based on past evidence.

We had a similar problem at a forum I’m a member of. It was so similar to what is happening here, I wouldn’t be surprised if we were dealing with the same individual. It boils down to this: how to kill that which has no life? This individual’s tactic was to slowly chip away at the forum. He had all the time in the world to create new accounts and use them to make sure the very mention of certain names and topics would get one instantly banned. Everything he touched was shut out of public discourse. Here is how we solved it. Since Internet trolling is illegal in the UK and we knew this person’s real identity, we filed a complaint with the legal authorities in his jurisdiction and the trolling stopped.

[Melendwyr]

Or you could adapt your moderation policies so that dealing with one single person doesn’t shut out entire topics of discourse.

[zzo38]

You can try to push the story and the medium to their maximum possibilities. Especially if you decide your restrictions ahead of time.