My claim? It was a moderator that said that
I’m not sure what this has to do with trolling. “Refusing to admit you’re wrong” doesn’t make one a troll. Lots of people hold positions that they defend vigorously.
It’s more behaviors like actively and persistently threadshitting and hijacking thread topics, or constantly misrepresenting other people’s positions in order to pretend they hold views they don’t, or refusing to respond to earnest questions about one’s position, or just repeatedly accusing people who don’t agree with you of being a hivemind or “sheeple” in non-Pit threads that are generally indicative of trolling.
There is a kind of personality spectrum for troll identification. Some people declare that pretty much anyone making a bad argument, usually from their political opposite, is a troll. Other people refuse to acknowledge a troll even after the person has themselves admitted to posting things they don’t believe.
And, of course, trolls themselves exist on a spectrum. Some of our long-time posters occasionally post provocative and outrageous things just to get a rise out of people. But they just post their own beliefs most of the time.
In my judgment, the hyper-vigilant troll spotters have an unwarranted confidence in their ability to tell when someone is trolling. If Rep. Steve King started posting on this board, I’m sure these folks would call him a troll. But that dude really believes the shit he says!
The word “virtually” was not just a throw away in that sentence. It means we tend to act more swiftly on the fringe cases in which idiocy is most likely not the explanation. The ones where there’s ambiguity most of us err on the side of letting people participate than overzealous banning.
It’s easier, I think, to think you’d ban all those trolls until you’re the one who has to ban them and wonder if you dumped someone who was just participating but in a less than stellar way.
I also thinks the mods have set a pretty high bar for accusing someone of trolling, and an even higher bar for accusing someone of being a troll (i.e., behavior warranting a ban). The idea being that it’s better to have a few trolls running around rather than falsely accusing folks of trolling. I’m OK with that.
And Richard Parker makes good points, as well. There does seem to be a tendency of some folks on this MB to be so sure they are on the one and only correct side of an issue that they think it’s impossible to be on the other side without being a troll.
This is a better explanation of what goes on.
The two are not mutually exclusive on the SDMB; a sincere troll is still a troll.
You need to understand the whole “troll” paradigm. Most people don’t. There are a few “real” trolls around, but probably at only about the same demographic percentage as clinically-recognized mental aberrations in the general public.
Anyone not aligning with the favored POV gets the troll label as a dismissive argumentation tactic. I’ve noticed long-standing seemingly credible posters here garner the troll smear when rhetoric reaches the right level. It really tells more about the accuser than the so-called troll in many cases.
No, some long standing posters get bored and/or crave attention so they start trolling. And they know here is great spot to do it.
BPC, the best thing you can do at this point is take a break, stare at the sky, listen to the birds and clear your head. As the election has drawn close you have been losing your sense of balance.
In the past two months you’ve reported 28 posts, almost all of them for trolling and you’re getting shriller. You need to calm down. I say this not in a punitive or warning fashion but in a way that has concern for your health.
Of those 28 reported posts, 3 of them were also reported by other posters. Generally, when there’s something egregious we - at least in GD and Elections - will see several reports on it all at once. You’re standing alone on most of your reports. You’re also in the habit of telling us - via reports - we should ban posters with whom you disagree as trolls.
So I really want you to calm down, take a breath, and think about how invested you are in calling other posters trolls. Remember, it’s a message board. It won’t control Tuesday’s outcome, it won’t set US policy moving forward and - as long experience has taught us - it’s not about to change a million people’s minds. If you feel you must interact - remember, you don’t have to do so - recall that our poster to reader numbers are large and that a well made argument can influence your invisible audience even if it doesn’t move the needle with those speaking with you.
I will demonstrate how it’s done.
This was an interesting discussion. Good points were made. I believe I made some good points. Having done that, I’m outta here. It’s easy-peasy. 
BPC, you have apparently allowed this guy to push your buttons and have given him a ton of attention. That’s exactly what he wants, so why should he stop?
I’d listen to Thelmalou, I really would.
And here we run, yet again, into a systemic problem of this board which is that the mods don’t have much of a toolbox–it’s basically just a banhammer. Yeah, who wants to ban someone who might be arguing in good faith but is just a clueless twit? What the mods need is to embrace DISRUPTION. Since nobody will ever install a Box to put people into temporarily to chill their shit out, start getting way more free with ejecting disruptive trolls from the threads they hijack so those debating in good faith can continue to do so without stumbling over endless irrelevant shitposts–trying to read and participate in a thoroughly trolled thread is like trying to walk through a room full of cats. You’re constantly dodging and having to stop and move the fuckers out of the way and after a while you just forget what the fuck you were trying to accomplish in there at all. Which is what the trolls are after.
And for those who keep insisting that everyone just not respond to the trolls–well, why exactly do you think it’s more sensible to expect the majority to change their non-problematical behavior than to actually insist that the trolls change their VERY problematical behavior? It’s like when one or two kids are assing off in a classroom and rather than discipline the ones making trouble they cancel recess for the whole class. That’s just stupid.
I would also note this is at least the sixth thread of this kind that Budget Player Cadet has started in ATMB in the past 20 months, insisting that we ban people he finds frustrating, or demanding that we preemptively close threads.
We get that you don’t like the way we handle this. But at this point, I would think that you would understand opening thread after thread to make the exact same complaint over and over again isn’t going to change our policy.
If we banned everyone who made stupid arguments, or made the same point over and over again, or wouldn’t admit they were wrong, Great Debates would be empty. You would do well to print this classic out and post it on your computer. 
That’s more or less what short-term suspensions of a week or a month are for - to force someone to step back and re-evaluate their mode of participation. Sometimes it works, and sometimes the culprits come roaring back in the same vein and promptly get squashed with the banhammer.
I don’t know how much of an administrative headache such things are but I for one wouldn’t mind seeing that tool used more often.
I think that was the case in the thread in question here. Furthermore, there were at least three other posts wrongly implying weaknesses in AGW theory, and these were all competently addressed. I think that’s a good thing.
Not that I support engaging with trolls in any way shape or form, or letting them disrupt threads, only that where there is doubt, and within reason, more information in a discussion is generally better than less information, and assuming that someone is not a troll rather than perhaps incorrectly that he is a troll allows misinformation to be corrected and, if nothing else, prevents others from being misled. That’s a good thing, too.
There definitely are a lot of non-troll idiots, and the only way to tell the difference is in a consistent pattern of behavior over time, which is a fairly objective measure that is quite different than personally finding a poster annoying. As a good example, we did have one famous troll awhile back, who shall remain nameless. The telltale signs that came out over time were, among other things, that (a) he definitely knew enough to know that many of his claims were total bullshit, (b) he completely ignored the evidence thereof, and (c) his claims were inconsistent and sometimes mutually contradictory at different times and places – the only real consistency was constant argument and threadshitting. But it took a while to definitively ID him as a troll and not just a moron. Except for bannees who return as socks, I think those types of genuine trolls are fairly rare.
Exactly my point in #6, where I said “… what I’m trying to explain in that quote is that, since the post contained a brief summary of the progress of the science in the past 30 years, it was information that I thought others would find useful or interesting, even if it did nothing to change the mind of our mutual friend. I tend to abide by the principle that more information is always better than less information …”. In my view, there are (many) times when letting something egregiously incorrect stand by just ignoring it gives the impression that “gee, that was a really good point that I don’t have an answer for” which is even worse in objective scientific discussions than in political ones because it lets objectively wrong information sit there advertising itself. I’m not saying we all have a duty to always jump in and correct the most laughable nonsense, but that is indeed the potential downside of the “ignore the annoying post” advice.
Suspensions are still too big a hammer though. The advantage of a penalty box is that the troll can still respond to poking, but only in the box. The posters they’ve annoyed can come into the box and poke them and tell them why they’re so fucking annoying and wrong. If they just disappear for a week then they’re right back in the mix being a shithead afterward it doesn’t really register that they’ve been punished–but seeing the indignant box threads is a nice bit of comic relief to those who’ve been irritated by troll activity. And the ones who get permaboxed are perfectly free to start any thread they like in the box and be as obnoxious as they like in there and those who prefer not to engage with that sort of behavior just ignore the entire forum and Bob’s yer uncle. Permaboxing is also an awesome way to prevent trolls from getting brownie points for being banninated–and make no mistake, within the troll community bannings are a badge of honor. Being wimpily confined to a stinky box, on the other hand, has no cachet whatsoever.
I disagree with you on every point under the sun, except possibly that the sun is up, but your posting style is totally different from the trolls.
Their posts can be seen in any forum and on any of a million subjects, but they are connected by a common form. An absurd, or non-factual, or demeaning assertion is made. Calls for a cite are ignored. Direct questions are left unanswered. A return to the beginning is made when seemingly cornered. The dead giveaway is that the same assertion, usually in the same words, is made 6, 12, 20 times.
All the life is sucked out of such threads, many of them worthy of true discussion. We already have a name for this: threadshitting.
Mods may be reluctant to call a poster a troll, but threadshitting is a common offense and can swiftly be dealt with. Offenders can be told to leave the thread and not return or to stay only if they abandon the nonsense or risk a warning. Threadshitting doesn’t call for value judgements or take political sides. Others in this thread already identified the behavior as threadshitting; I’m not alone.
Use Threadshitaway for a cleaner, friendlier, germ-free Dope!*
*Also a dessert topping in fourteen states.
I do try to kick people out of threads they are disrupting, for whatever reason. It is a good tool.
It’s not always universally appreciated, although the folks who get kicked out are rarely the ones who complain.
This board needs to learn that arbitrary and capricious modding is to be embraced rather than feared–but only when the consequences aren’t draconian and irrevocable. It’s why we use sheepdogs to harass and chase the sheep into where they need to go instead of employing wolves to murder the ones who stray from the herd.