Yeah, computer stuff is hard, you have my sympathy. :rolleyes:
Seven banned??? Huh?
That’s odd…
Ssh! If you don’t watch your step, you might be next!
So I guess we have our answer.
wah
on edit…in response to Inner Stickler.
I’d like to weigh in a bit seriously on this.
Any time someone brings up some idea to reduce stupidity in a community, I cringe. It’s always with good intentions that someone gets the idea to punish people who go off topic, or post stupid things, and it ends up with the people who really care about maintaining the consensus in power, and they use these policies drive off the posters who aren’t as interested in just agreeing with everyone else.
It’s one thing to pop someone who stars posting completely unrelated things, or racist rants, or whatever, but this sort of proposed micromanagement seems, to me, to be dangerous. I don’t really trust the moderators to make a decision on someone being “stupid”, and I especially don’t trust other posters to keep a thread “on track”.
The idea of removing stupidity really means removing dissent; it gets enforced by the wrong people for the wrong reason. There’s already an ignore function on the board, and “don’t feed the trolls” is a mantra for those who don’t like conflict. The need to punish people even more for daring to dissent speaks more about your problems than any mere “threadshitter”.
Threadshitting is not the same as stupidity, and definitely isn’t the same as dissent.
Dissent is a good thing. It gives the boards a lot of their character. But there’s a difference between stating a dissenting opinion and posting random off-topic gibberish or posting “death to kittens” in a kitty pic thread or “Apple sucks” in a thread about organizing music on iPods.
Dissent is constructive. It helps to build knowledge and fight ignorance.
Threadshitting is destructive. It accomplishes nothing other than making people angry and derailing discussions.
I didn’t claim it was a good thing. But I just don’t agree that it’s particularly disruptive, given the ability to ignore, and some sort of penalty box would just give people another tool to enforce their ideals on everyone else. And the posters who complain the most are the exact people that are the type to abuse things like that.
I understand what you’re saying, ivn1188, but I get the impression not too many people actually use the “ignore” feature, as it can make it difficult to follow the flow of a thread. This means that threadshitters can get the discussion off track and make the signal-to-noise ratio pretty ugly.
I still feel (speaking personally, not with a mod hat on) that threadshitters are just another form of troll, but that dissenters and ignorant posts add to the discussion and bring out more information in the end.
Most people on the board know to quote the post they are responding to. So, if the blocked person said anything of interest, you’ll see it quoted. Otherwise, you know you can safely ignore it. If someone didn’t quote the post, you can always unhide just the one post, just that one time.