In a thread in the Pit where we are discussing our opinions over whether or not posters are trolling, I linked to a thread where a poster was moderated to give an example of past misbehavior. I didn’t link to a particular post (that would be like accusing someone of trolling outside of the Pit since there would be a link from their post to a troll discussion) but my link was broken. The explanation was that it would give a live reference to a “you are trolling” thread outside the Pit.
I’m not upset about the moderation or protesting it, I didn’t receive a warning or even a note. I’m just trying to understand it so that it doesn’t happen again if it’s breaking the rules. And I wanted it in ATMB so others know as well. Discussions about whether or not trolling occurs happen frequently in the Pit (it’s the only place where they can happen) and if this is not allowed people should know this.
Obviously the person being discussed gets no notification, because their name isn’t given an @ and their post isn’t being linked to, so that isn’t an issue.
The one way I see that this might be a problem is that if someone reads that thread, in the first post there will be a link back to a post that discusses a specific poster trolling in the thread. And then that’s almost like a warning to people in that thread, saying “Hey, just an FYI some people think this person in this thread is a troll.” And we don’t want that.
Is this the only problem this would cause, or is there another issue with such a link I’m not seeing? (I agree that just the one issue is enough that doing such a thing shouldn’t be allowed.)
I’m just posting this thread to make sure I understand and maybe as a bit of an FYI. I believe I’ve seen others link from a troll discussion thread or post to another thread outside the Pit and I can see now how that can be a problem.
The effect being moderated is: a link from a Pit thread titled in a way that it is an accusation of trolling to a non-Pit thread, so that the visible back-link (by the title of the linked Pit thread) appears as an accusation of trolling in a non-Pit thread.
So if you’re in a Pit thread whose title is explicitly about trolling*, you simply cannot link any other thread or post in a non-Pit thread.
*Currently, only one of those. So the guideline is simple: do not link into or out of this thread into any non-Pit thread.
I didn’t screenshot the example I saw before the link was broken, but it’s glaringly obvious if you see it.
I’ll be honest, I’m a little unsure myself. I broke a link from @MrDibble the other day in the same situation and I second guessed myself. Again, no warning of course.
We definitely do not want links directly to posts of the one being called a troll.
To the thread, is a lot more grey and might do more good than bad.
Is there an actual guideline that says that though?
I’m not a mod, but my understanding is that the link is an accusation of trolling the same as calling someone explicitly a troll in a post. Otherwise, the “no insults” rule is immediately circumventable by just linking to a thread whose title conveys the intended insult.
In other words, this is just a specific implementation of “no insults outside the Pit, where the insult is the title of a thread that remains acceptable only if it remains in the Pit.”
The “guideline” is just my interpretation of the behavior limitations necessary to remain within the spirit of the rules. Advice, as it were.
As a non-mod, I can’t give controlling direction here any more than I can order my neighbor ro stip mowing their lawn while I’m trying to sleep in.
I looked at the back link. It looked like an accusation of trolling against the originator of the non-Pit thread, and not the subject of the criticism, which is even worse since it was misdirected.
It still looks like an insult outside of the Pit.
I was one of the ones (perhaps the only?) to report the backlink, and I always look at the backlink in its non-Pit context to make sure there really is a problem.
gnoitall sums up the issue pretty well. When we first adopted the rule about insulting other users in thread titles, the Troll thread was a bit of a difficulty, because there really wasn’t a way to rename it so linking from it didn’t accidentally break the rule against insults in non-Pit forums, while still making it clear what the thread was actually about. The workaround (that was arrived at largely by the participants of the Troll thread, and not the mod staff) was to not post any live links to other (non-Pit) threads. Best practice is either state the name and forum of the thread, or put some spaces in the link so that Discourse can’t parse it correctly.
FWIW, I appreciate the discussion. It’s a subtle effect and not obvious at the moment it’s done, but I personally hate loopholes and worry about something like this becoming a viable way to insult and troll (if done intentionally), so being reasssured that the mods understand the issue is very comforting.
On reconsideration, I removed this bit from my previous post. “Don’t make links that could possibly be construed as insults,” is a bit more restrictive than I want this to be. The point is to avoid explicit (if unintentional) insults showing up in non-Pit forums, not to completely firewall the Pit off from other forums. If there’s a tangent in the Troll thread about banana bread, and someone links to a really good banana bread recipe in MPSIMS, that should be fine. Stuff that might look like an insult if someone doesn’t take the two seconds to click a link to get the context isn’t an issue.
Breaking the link was still the correct move in this specific case, because the poster being accused of trolling was also the OP of the thread where the alleged trolling was occurring. A more grey area would be something like:
Poster A starts a thread.
Poster B trolls that thread.
Poster C goes to the troll thread, links to Poster A’s OP, then says, “Poster B is trolling the fuck out of this thread.”
In that case, you’d get the back link showing up in the OP, but not on the specific post that’s being called out as trolling. I think we’d still break the link there, as you’re still calling Poster B a troll, in a non-Pit thread.
Then I was misconstrued as to the original purpose of the original (informal Doper-derived) “rule” in question. I thought we stopped doing that because it would alert the “target” and cause them to come over to the Pit Trolling thread and gum it up (if they did not know about the existence and purpose of said thread of course, which would be true for authentic newbies but likely not for returning socks). I recall several examples of that happening early on in the original Troll thread’s existence, which soon resulted in everyone not linking anymore.
The other issue is that people will often make just indirect non-specific references to the (non-Pit) thread and the offending poster and their posts (“Hey, anybody get a gander at that new guy trolling in the Israel thread?”), forcing anybody who wasn’t aware of said instances to have to scour the entire board trying to deduce which subforum and then thread it was in, if not which specific poster it is–and forget trying to track down the specific posts in question. With a direct link there would typically be no such guesswork required. People have gotten a BIT better about this lately, with the exact (unlinked) names of the thread and poster often now provided.
I guess, then, that it isn’t possible to disable links of this sort from going back to a specific subforum? Have no posts from the Pit ever get displayed as links in non-Pit threads, and poof no more issues, unless I missed something here.
If I’m not giving a link I’ll usually tell you the name of the thread and which category it’s in. That should be enough to find it easily, especially if it’s not a dormant thread you have to dig for.
I am in agreement with you about how annoying it can be when folks are too cryptic and think that everyone else is going to understand their wink wink, nudge nudge attempt. It comes off like twisted reasoning you’d see from the ‘60s Batman TV show which assumes someone else would make the same ridiculous leaps of “logic” to figure it out. We don’t really need links, just unambiguous directions.
That might be an element of why posters don’t do that, but it wouldn’t be something that would be enforced by moderators. There are occasional reports about someone who’s been called out in the troll thread “derailing” it by fighting back in that thread, but I never act on them. One of the bedrock principles of the Pit is that if you’re going to hit someone, they get to hit back.
We asked about that, but the software doesn’t allow it. IIRC, it might have been possible to turn off the back link function entirely, just not for specific sub-forums. But we didn’t think the problem was bad enough to nuke the entire feature, was has a lot of utility in other contexts.
As a general note, one can `back-quote` a link like so: https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linking-a-pit-post-about-trolling-to-another-thread/1003059/14
which makes it very easy to copy-paste.
It does work but it is indeed a big pain in the butt. In the test thread, the backlink shows the title of the interim thread, which is harmlessly titled “Linked from another thread.”
I don’t think the concern is solely the name of the link. It’s that if you follow the link it leads you to an accusation of trolling for someone in that thread. That’s at least what happened with the link I had changed and I agree that it’s problematic. It’s a way to indirectly advertise an accusation of trolling outside of the Pit.
So if you were to do a double link to my post here that leads to a link to a post saying, “Atamasama sure is trolling with that ATMB thread about linking to troll discussions,” you’re effectively directing people from here to an accusation of me trolling here, regardless of how neutral the name of the link is.
Thats the issue I would see with it. I do however think it’s a novel way to get around the problem if it was just the name of the link that’s a problem.