Dayum. You made it 22-1/2 years and finally lost it to this? Oops. 
Speaking of stupid …
Is aceplace57 really that stupid? I swear there is no situation so simple that he can’t totally misunderstand it. He also seems uniquely impervious to learning.
I don’t think he’s malicious. In fact I sorta pity the guy. But golly can his obliviousness climb under my skin.
Why haven’t I blocked them? Maybe I’m the stupid one.
Can you tell us where his latest stupidity happened? I’m always amused at acey’s latest stupidity, he’s clearly the number one candidate for the Dope’s village idiot.
Try the brown university shooting thread.
He’s musing that “clearly” the shooter had “extensive intel” on the building’s security measures. Probably an inside job.
Yeah, he really is thick as a brick.
I don’t think he’s malicious, either. I do think he’s a bit simple, and he loves to post in any thread about a celebrity, usually with a personal remembrance which is only tangential to the topic at hand.
He’s at his worst in threads about celebrity deaths and tragedies, because following such stories (like Gabby Petito’s disappearance) is a hobby for him, and he posts breathless speculation over every bit of new information.
His never-ending stream of comments in the long running Russian Ukrainian war / regional situation thread are of that same ilk.
Find an article, misunderstand it or its implications, post a cite to it along with his confused commentary, then when others respond with better thoughts or corrections he sorta blinks and moves on to do it again.
IRL I’m friends with a developmentally disabled guy. We communicate mostly by chat, and it’s a lot like talking to an 8yo, but an 8yo concerned about / interested in adult things. But with an 8yo’s powers of discernment.
It’s easy enough for me to to get on his wavelength, but I do need to think twice about what I say and how I say it.
I think acey is just capable enough to fool me into interacting grown-up to grown-up, which isn’t really the right way to approach them. The fact he’s appearing in threads with all the normies makes it hard for me to engage “acey-mode” when reading or replying to him. In a one-on-one I could probably home in on his wavelength eventually.
That’s pretty stupid, but I read a thousand posts of him that were even stupider. This didn’t even register with me anymore.
ETA: he’s not totally useless, though. He has good taste and wide knowledge in country music and has given me some great tips and recommendations there, so there’s that.
Sometimes he’s an utter asshole in his stupidity though.
Like this thread about a 14 year old girl who was kidnapped, imprisoned, and sexually abused for 9 months - the family should have realized she was “just” a runaway and probably just took off with her older boyfriend, and the poor guy will probably get sent to jail for it.
FYI, there are already a couple Pit threads for him. Not that I’m suggesting a better place for this conversation…
He’s been Noted multiple times in the Russia/Ukraine thread for his addled musings along with relevant links. He eventually figured it out. As noted above, he really knows his music including very technical music theory in guitar playing threads. His posts there are very intelligent. He’s either a savant or breaks character for that one subject.
This has got to be the Durpiest thing ever. Someone asks a potentially interesting question in FQ asking about church service attendance in America in the past. With one exception, the first 20+ posts are personal anecdotes mostly bragging about how they never attended as a child back in the day and never will. They just can’t help themselves.
I’ve stayed away from that thread. For many reasons, but I noticed that too.
The question is framed to make you want to tell your story. I guess.
At least through mod action, people have been put on notice and had their posts hidden.
You’d have to just read the thread title and ignore what the OP actually wrote, and forget what category you’re in to think those were okay posts.
I’m inclined to see it a little differently. If someone starts a thread, and a mod feels that out of the first 20 replies at least 15 have to be hidden as “off-topic”, then something isn’t right and it’s likely not primarily the fault of all 15 posters (and a few that came after that, who got the same treatment). Maybe the OP should have framed the question differently, or the whole thread could have been moved to IMHO where the discussion could have continued and the OP might eventually have got whatever factual information they were looking for.
I think the thread is in a grey area between FQ and IMHO. Theoretically, there is a factual, statistically proven answer, but that’s very unlikely given the time (the 50s) we’re talking about there, and the way the question was phrased invited anecdotes. I’d move it to IMHO if I was a mod.
But people did provide data which grated was flawed but that what clearly what they wanted to discuss. If you ask about demographic trends since the 1950s, what your specific family did is irrelevant. Your observations about the entire congregation about your specific church might be.
I totally agree, but when I first read the OP very early, I asked myself “Isn’t this better suited for IMHO?” and also thought “Watch the anecdotes coming in…”. Which is exactly what happened.
You’re forgetting about herd mentality. It just takes a couple of posters to answer improperly to get others to join in, because hey, that’s what this thread is about now. It’s not so much that every person is independently choosing to do the wrong thing. Threads get momentum, and it’s hard to see what’s happening. I’m guilty of that. I have only once received a warning on this site, and it was for going off-topic in P&E. And I wasn’t the person who put the thread off-topic, I was just joining in with a discussion that went off-topic. The problem is that I got caught up in that too many times and got a warning. Each time, I was going with the flow. (I’m not arguing against the moderation, I broke the rules and I’ve changed how I post since then and I’m extremely careful about not joining hijacks anymore.)
My point is that no, it doesn’t take a lot for a thread to go completely off the rails, and it doesn’t have to be the OP’s fault. I don’t see that it is in this case either.
If the thread is unlikely to have a FQ answer, then the appropriate response is to point that out. Not ignore the factual question and just start spouting anecdotes.
As one of the durps, this did occur to me, but after seeing a few anecdote-type answers (including from some very respectable dopers) I decided to contribute my little mite.
This seems to have been the meat of the OP’s question:
To which my answer would be: not unless they asked more questions at the time, and published them. That was a significant part of the first reply in the thread, which ended with
followed by mostly anecdote.
I’m one of the ones that flagged that thread. The post immediately after the modnote has to win the prize for idiocy.
@wolfpup, no, just no. Faulty reasoning. FQ is factual. You want to react to the OP and tell a story, use the
How to Reply as a linked Topic
Click Reply, in the upper left corner of the reply window is the reply type button, looks like a curving arrow point to the right.
Choose Reply as linked topic and it starts a new thread. As an example, you can choose GD, IMHO or The Pit for it.
That is actually the best method.
Don’t blather about your experience when someone is looking for facts. @Chronos summed it up well. If a thread goes nowhere for lack of factual information, so be it. Let it.