What got me, of all people, thinking that the mods here needed to be more pragmatic in booting trolls was this thread, where Dex expressed frustration at what I think he saw as a no-win situation for the mods, i.e. mods having to deal calmly and fairly with people they saw as being only here to stir up trouble. As far what specific posters would or would not fall into that category, that’s a judgment call the mods would have to make. But I think they’d be wrong only rarely – I think if you look at the first e.g. 50 posts of just about any long-time poster here, you’d see few if any of them spent the majority of their early posts on hot button issues, like moderation, extreme political views, file sharing, etc.
Again, I suggest this only as a solution to the mods feeling frustrated and hamstrung by the current rules. Personally, I don’t mind the trolls – they give me someone to make fun of in the Pit. But I don’t have to mod them, either.
That’s probably fairly accurate, except that extreme political views are common among new posters here. Even though extreme political views applies to SmashTheState, I’m not sure how his question about file posting (uuencoding) serves to define him as a troll in re moderation. He asked an honest and open question, he got an honest and open answer, and unless he chooses to Smash The SDMB as a response, I’ll take it as such.
I’ll add that his extreme political views are very obviously what he believes and what he acts on in real life.
I’d prefer not to get into the details of my troll assessment in ATMB, in light of Skip’s posts. I will say that I could be incorrect, but that was kind of my point, that the mods should have the freedom to ban possible/probable trolls without waiting for ironclad proof.
Understood. However, if it is indeed your policy for your members and guests to not get “smacked with something that they didn’t ask for specifically”, then I fail to see how the discrepancy that Canadjun pointed out truly is apples to your oranges.
Frankly, I think that posting a file as a UUencoding is probably safer than a regular link. Regular links aren’t just for innocent filetypes, either: A link could point to an executable file, too. But it’s a lot more trouble to extract data from a UUencoded file than from a link, so anyone computer-savvy enough to get the UUencoded file is probably also savvy enough to recognize if the resulting file is an executable instead of the promised MIDI, whereas a less-savvy user might well unwittingly run a program from a link.
We can’t help you with the ads; we CAN remove malicious links when we find them. We CAN remove spam when we see it. We do what we can with what we have. For the rest, sorry.
Double-standard? How so? We simply don’t have any control over the ads, or any input regarding what those ads are. We don’t set policy for them and we don’t get asked what that policy should be.
What we do have control over, however, we do our best to keep annoyances to a minimum.
The Board makes very clear that guests will see ads and that members do not. It is currently the major incentive to induce payment.
I see the situation as the reverse. If you choose not to join as a member, then you have made the deliberate choice to see ads. Therefore, ads for guests are truly apples to the oranges of what happens with a malicious link.
The ads don’t bother me, since I block them. I just found it to be interesting that Tubadiva was speaking so altruistically about preventing people from hearing or seeing things they don’t want to see, what with the recent complaints about the intrusive popups with sound and video.
But whatever. It’s not my message board, I just post here.
So you are saying that, because the masters in charge of revenue are allowing ads that are obnoxious, the administrators should allow potentially obnoxious postings in order to avoid having a “double standard?” :dubious:
I think the point is that the presence of obnoxious ads that are not subject to the “two-click” rule removes some of the importance of the “two-click” rule regardless of whether the enforcers of that rule have any control over the ad content.
Given the ads, all threads are potentially NSFW for ethical guests regardless of any rules concerning the thread content (ethical in the sense of not taking the third option regarding whether to be a member and whether to see ads ).
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