Standard procedure to deal with someone that seems like a troll
There is a user I do not wish to mention to prevent a witch Hunt or if I am wrong. In the past two days I have seen them post two topics with fairly contentious topics, but nothing was wrong with the topic itself. The user however, has a flame bait sentence in each of these posts, ex. "I am against homosexual marriage". He then waits for a few heated responses and then edits out the flame bait sentence.
This makes it look like an innocuous post is suddently full of hot heads immediately starting fights based off their assumptions and not what the user posted.
How do we deal with what seems like a troll that operates like this? I won't be posting on his posts anymore as you shouldn't feed the troll, but he definitely got me the first time and it's unreasonable to expect everyone to always be on the lookout for this.
Edit: to everyone saying I am jumping the gun by accusing him of being a troll. That may very well be, which is why I declined to name the user. Even if it's not intentional, it's causing problems if we want this to be a place for high quality discussion. Messaging @deimos has been suggested as an option and is probably the best choice for now but will not scale. What should be our solution to this issue going forward that scales?
When I spotted a problem user last week I sent a private message to @Deimos and he replied and took action almost immediately.
While I like @deimos (thanks for the invite btw!), I am concerned about having one person having so much power and sway over this website.
I think that contacting him directly in these kinds of circumstances is a good solution for now, but long term I'm really hoping that the trust system kicks in and more people are allowed to moderate/take action.
He'll always have that much power over the site, though.
Well... yes. That is the long-term plan for the website.
But, right now, it's a very bare-bones website with only minimal functionality and only one administrator. That's the nature of the beast. To have multiple moderators would require the building of moderation tools for those moderators to use - which will take time.
Not specifically to deal with confirmed trolls, but quoting relevent parts of parent comments seems like it would be a good habit to get into. That way context is immediately clear (also with unedited OP) and troll edits are a lot less harmful.
If we want that, there should be an easy 'quote' button since expecting everyone to learn Markdown is unrealistic.
One can quote in markdown by simply using a
>. To me, this does not seem to difficult to learn.TBH, I didn't know markdown existed until I got to this forum. I'd learned a lot of it on Reddit just looking here and there.
The issue isn't that it's too difficult to learn. It's that there's another barrier to entry. What does it add to the Tildes experience or communities to be a markdown gatekeeper? What other use does markdown have?
Markdown knowledge is not required to post. You can communicate just fine without it. If someone comes in without any markdown knowledge their posts might look a bit simplistic, but they will still work fine. If this person really wants to learn how to do something, they can search markdown quote or markdown strikethough etc. This person can also learn markdown through seeing others posts.
What about programs like pandoc that can convert markdown to almost any other format imaginable?
It makes easy to go from markdown to HTML, pptx, epub, docx, revealjs or quite a few other formats
While that is a nice piece of software, who in their right mind would write in markdown to then translate to html or epub? That's a ridiculous use case.
Someone who doesn't want to take the time to familiarise themselves with anything but markdown, I suppose. I'm sure the philosophy behind pandoc is to make conversion as painless as possible.
How is it different from learning bbcode or something similar in other forums?
Markdown, I find, is even simpler, maybe even the simplest way to format text without having a what you see is what you get editor.
It's not arduous to learn a few symbols that do a certain thing on forums, it's a standard that many different forums have (not markdown specifically, but learning specific syntax that lets you format things a certain way).
My real issue isn't that it's too hard. What does it give us? Where else do markdown or bbcode have any benefit? What benefit comes from being gatekeepers this way?
I see the benefit as being able to easily format longer posts in a readable manner and to easily do certain tasks that you might have to repeat often, like quoting, linking, or making a list.
How would you rather do those things?
Are we being gatekeepers? We are not demanding people post with markdown syntax. Any particular user can just ignore markdown altogether, with little to no detriment.
Well, I take issue with the idea that it's easy. It's yet another error-antagonistic code that has extremely limited use elsewhere. We use it because reddit does, or other sites have before. There's no real benefit here.
I'd suggest we use WYSIWYG and HTML with a tabbed interface. If someone wants to use code to format their posts and comments, that's fine. But let's use the code that runs the web, something useful and standards compliant.
I can get behind this argument. All-in-all I would definitely prefer to see a more complete support of HTML tags in the comment box. Though with a WYSIWYG editor, would that increase the load time of the site in any way?
Just a quickie from the docs
Unfortunately, it's not immediately obvious what HTML works and what doesn't.
Maybe we should make it part of community standards to add an "EDIT: [reason]" section when removing content from a comment? This wouldn't be necessary for simple spelling errors and such, but it would allow mods/admins to tell who's editing their comments in good faith to keep a civil tone and who is editing comments to bait people into a flame war.
I'd love if there was some sort of wiki-style version control for comments, but I'm not sure what the site overhead on that would be.
I saw this discussed in another thread where it was pointed out this would be detrimental to people trying to edit out personal information.
Maybe if a person posts personal information then the only recourse to remove it is to completely delete their submission or thread. Keep edit history public but make self-deleted content only available to the admins.
That seems pretty extreme to me.
I don't think edit history would be useful enough in general to warrant the extra complexity and overhead involved.
That'd still make people uncomfortable. Admin or not they're still a stranger who should not have the information you edited out.
Well, maybe admins could have the ability to wipe that specific piece of info off. But to be honest, that's trying to put the cat back in the bag.
I'd like to see StackExchange-based edit system. Each edit would have description what was edited (fixed grammer, rephrased 2nd paragraph) and each post should have publicly visible editing history.
I think there needs to be clear proof of intention. A simple edit just doesn't meet that for me, as the user may have chosen to rephrase whatever they were saying based on comments. These contentious topics, I've found, lead to a lot of misunderstanding and heated anger on both sides and so we have to tread carefully before deciding someone with the opposite opinion is a troll.
I see that I'm not the only person who feels like this user is just trolling us.
Posting intentionally offensive content, getting responses (that they never reply to), and then editing out the controversial parts, is an almost textbook definition of a troll.
It's one thing to post a view and then correspond with users as they bring knowledge and differing points of view, to learn and to grow, but I feel that this person is, in a sense, intentionally feeding off of the anger and what-not in the threads.
I posted this sentiment in the homosexual marriage thread, only to have users question me and attempt to bait me into further responses there, when I specifically stated in the post that there would be only 1 post there about it, because while I wanted to raise the point, I did not wish to feed the troll.
Isn't it possible he edited it out because of the response? I think you're all jumping the gun a bit here.
I would have thought so but they are divisive topics, low effort posts, and he's edited out the flame part multiple times. They aren't posts where it's phrased poorly it's been the format of [low effort but reasonable paragraph]. [Completely disruptive comment that insults many people] and he removed the second part. When I say insults it's not an interpretation thing either. On one post he called people degenerates
I'd say most of his posts are divisive rather than low effort. Which I don't see the issue in. Maybe it's because the majority of ~ right now are all in agreement on one side.
And it was edited out before anyone even got to say anything in response no? We've just had a topic where someone wished ~ had a count on how many times a user wrote a comment and then deleted it. Maybe Toad wrote it and realize the tone is not befitting of this website. We're all certainly talking a tad differently here than we would do else where.
I thought people managed to post before he edited it. On the homosexual marriage post I know for sure several people posted before he edited as I was one of them
I don't know, it's usually a couple sentences designed to rub the majority here the wrong way, the worst of which gets edited out (disclosure: I have not personally seen the editing or proof of such)
Look at the confusion it caused you in the homosexual marriage thread, someone responded to the text in their submission, OP edited it out, then you and a few other responded to that person accusing him of making assumptions about the OPs intentions.
I would hope that people who edit out statements like this would at least add in an "EDIT: Whoa, sorry this sentence was way out of line/this sentence seems to have provoked more of a response than intended" if they aren't intending to cause drama. At least, that seems like the right way to handle that type of situation to me.
There, I believe, would lay the difference
I think that the only protection against someone editing a post after the fact is quoting the text to which you're responding, as mentioned elsewhere.
As for the difference between "troll" and "poster of divisive topics" lies in effort and genuinity. Genuine discussions can get heated, especially when the subject matter is emotionally charged. There is another poster on this site whom I would call a genuine poster of content that seems divisive or even oppositional given the user base (I value his participation for that and have stated so previously on comment threads). I have not seen him flamebait and switch, nor have I seen him kick a beehive and walk away from it. Therein, I believe, lies the difference.
Another very sensible protection against this type of "edit trolling" is to make all edit histories public.
Sounds like you want to blame the victim ("I am against homosexual marriage" is NOT flamebait) for the bad reactions of commenters (the real trolls, from the sound of it). But I don't know what thread(s) you're talking about, so maybe I'm missing something.
That one was a borderline case. The other one he called people degenerates which would have no reasonable reaction but anger.
Depends on who he called degenerates and why. I'd have no problem with calling rapists degenerates, for example. But now I feel like I'm playing devil's advocate. :)
A bit. I have the same feeling on rapists but insulting anyone in a discussion doesn't lead to more discussion. It's just yelling at each other until someone gives up
Edit : also the group he called degenerates were candian high schoolers which I don't think most people would find to be degenerates, who who knows