Bone
February 23, 2017, 7:26am
3
You quote from the general FAQ here . The Pit rules are slightly different and read as follows (my bold):
By trolling, we mean posting of inflammatory comments **solely **to get a rise out of people. If we feel your primary goal as a poster is to make people mad, you’ll quickly find yourself on the road to banning. On the flip side, the fact that a poster consistently makes you mad doesn’t automatically make them a troll.
Is your intention to restriction your inquiry to activity in the Pit? If it is, what Miller has previously posted may be helpful for context:
I have modded people for trolling in the Pit, but it’s got to be pretty exceptional instance. The usual definition of “posting just to make people angry” doesn’t quite work, because the Pit is specifically intended as a place you can got to get in fights with people - which generally involves making them angry. If we determine that a person is taking positions that they don’t actually hold just to start fights, that can draw a warning, but I usually will only do that for an explicit admission that a poster’s been lying about their positions - and by “explicit admission,” I don’t mean posting something like, “I love watching you libs/pubs get all wound up!” I mean something like, “Yeah, I was just making that stuff up to see how people would react.”
Pretty straightforward for most of the board. In the Pit, though? The Pit was created specifically so that posters could have a place to go to get in fights with each other. The basic function of the forum necessitates a looser enforcement of the rule against trolling, else every third post in there would be drawing a warning.
That’s not the same as saying that trolling is “allowed.” It’s just that it’s a higher bar to clear. If you’re misrepresenting yourself in someway, for example, then you can still be banned for trolling. One poster was banned for claiming (in a Pit thread, I’m pretty sure) that his parents had died at the WTC, but someone turned up an older (but still post-9/11) thread where he’d talked about them being alive. We’ve had the occasional poster take, say, a hard-line anti-gay stance for three or four pages, then turn around and say he didn’t really believe any of it, he just wanted to see how people react. That’s still trolling.
So you are right that this rule still applies to some degree in the Pit. It is different there than the rest of the forums on the board and Miller has been herculean in his consistency of application. I’ll let him elaborate further if he desires. If you wanted to have a broader discussion about the board’s application of the rule against trolling then feel free to expand your inquiry.