:rolleyes:
A mesage board is not a real-time conversation. I, myself, have been known to post a question and head straight to bed, to read the responses the next day. Don’t like it? So, sue me.
Sorry Marley23, I realise it’s Czarcasm I should be addressing my question to… unless you want to answer for him again?
I’m the OP for this thread. I haven’t posted anything in a while, but I wanted to reassure those participating in it that I am reading their responses. Thank you for participating. I have nothing more to add to the thread for the time being.
You may question Mod decisions to your heart’s content in ATMB.
Direct insults, however, are still limited to the BBQ Pit. If you feel you have a need to be insulting, open your own thread in that Forum.
[ /Moderating ]
And so it begins. 
This must be confusing if people aren’t familiar with this situation. scrambledeggs starts about four threads a night and almost never returns to post in any of them, and has continued doing that for about five weeks. He’s got 168 posts over the last month and 100 of them are OPs. A majority of the time he ignores his threads after starting them. There is no rule requiring people to return to their own threads, either immediately or ever, and we aren’t making one. That is not how this should be interpreted. I’d say it’s expected and considered polite to stay involved in your own threads, but if an OP doesn’t come back for whatever reason, it’s not a big deal. People will call an OP on it in a debate thread or pitting, or if a story seems incomplete, but regardless life goes on. And there’s no rule about how many posts or how often anyone can start threads either.
But if somebody does this over and over again it starts to become an issue because it’s just an assinine way to behave. scrambledeggs has started a few controversial threads, like that memorable Pit question about fat women dressing alike, but most of the time he’s asking trivial stuff- and why ask all these questions if you don’t care about the answer?
We’ve tried to explain this to scrambledeggs. Repeatedly. We let him do his thing for a while after he signed up, then politely explained that it was a good idea to participate in his own threads so he could see the answers to his questions or (if he was actually reading them) ask more questions and learn more. And because it’s polite to do so. And because a lot of the time, when a thread is started, people reply with questions to the OP, which were going unanswered in his case. He was not interested in any advice and continued doing what he was doing before.
We then explained that if he kept doing this, people were going to stop taking his questions seriously, which has indeed started to happen. We also pointed out that he starts a ton of threads in the wrong forum and asked that he take a few seconds before posting to think about the forum descriptions and put the threads in the right places. He wouldn’t do that either, so we started locking his misplaced threads.
Basically we’ve asked him to pay some more attention to the way other Dopers post so he can get along a little better, and he’s not interested. We’re discussing how to deal with this. There would be nothing to talk about if he wasn’t making a point of doing what he’s doing. Why he’s refused to take any suggestions and doesn’t want to interact with other posters, I don’t know.
**Marley23 **- thanks for the explanation. Put like that, your actions seem sensible. I, for one, understand now.
**MissMossie **- thank you for your confirmation of your participation. It has been entered in to the Participation Ledger.
Which is what I did. Note the suffix; I called the moderaTION idiotic, not the moderatOR. Don’t bother to claim they’re eqivalent–they are not.
I’m still confused.
How should it be interpreted, he opens a thread and it get’s closed within minutes.
So why is he getting called on it if there’s no rule against it?
This is what I really don’t get. You seem to equate not participating in the thread as not reading it. Perhaps he does come back and read the thread. How would you know? Earlier Czarcasm said it was like going to a party, asking a question to a group of people and then walking away. That’s not the case, not even kind of what’s going on. It be like going to a party, asking a question and then saying “Here, write all your thoughts about it on this paper and I’ll come back later and read it” Q.E.D. alluded to this as well.
It seems like at this point you might as well just put him out of his misery and ban him.
Strange: When I go to the post in ATMB and click the links on the warnings I get a message that I do not have permission to access those links.
He was asked to come back to some of his older threads before starting any more of them. He didn’t, of course.
Because he took an allowable behavior to a ridiculous excess. You’re allowed to start threads about how much you like chocolate, but if you started four of them a night and half of them were in the wrong forum, you’d eventually draw a warning for it. That doesn’t mean we need a rule against starting too many threads about chocolate.
He was asked in his own threads to make follow-up posts and never did. I believe there was one thread yesterday where Czarcasm instructed him to come back to the thread and participate, and he didn’t.
We actually had to PM and email this guy his warnings to make sure he read them. That’s absurd.
Message boards are usually two-way communication - yunno, like a conversation. When a poster makes a ridiculous habit of it the way scrambledeggs has, something else is up. There is zero evidence that he returned to scores of his own threads. If people asked him questions about what he’d written, he didn’t answer. What’s the point? If you think that’s posting in good faith, you’re welcome to that interpretation. I don’t think that’s what it was.
We do expect people to finish what they start; to simply plant questions and walk off is not what this board is about. If you’re not willing to support the stuff you start maybe the question is not worth asking in the first place.
Scrambledeggs was advised of this numerous times informally and then formally. He chose not to acknowledge except to say that he didn’t really care to participate like that.
He also added greatly to the moderator workload by not placing his threads in appropriate forum areas. He was counseled on this multiple times as well and apparently never paid us any attention in that department either.
When a moderator asks you politely to do something it’s really meaningful. When a moderator tells you policy it’s not just a suggestion. When you ignore all of this and persist, it’s at your peril.
Not that it matters anymore, but if you’ll gander here
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=9968722&postcount=11
He did have at least one post after the OP in more then half of the linked threads, 6 out of 9 of them I think.
BTW I didn’t read the OPs, I didn’t read the replies that he made, I don’t even know for certain what ‘shotgunning’ threads means, though I do have a guess (probably nothing to do with starting threads and then not responding to them). Just something I wanted to point out.
Take out the few threads he did visit repeatedly - the liberal arts degree one and a couple of others - and I am sure he did not return to more than half the threads he started. When you do this and start 100 threads in a month, you have the issue at hand. Is this really that confusing?
Shotgunning is just a term I threw out for his habit of starting one thread after another without stopping to aim.
If a post was judged on it’s merits, and not who it was posted by, would we even be having this discussion?
If somebody else had made 100 posts like that, we’d be having the same discussion. The suspension was about the body of posts scrambledeggs made, not that one thread, although he did ignore the mods yet again when he posted it.
I’m pretty sure you’re wrong about this; shotgunning is when you punch a hole in the side of a thread, then open the top and try to drink it through the hole as quickly as possible.
You should really pay more attention to the technical terms you’re using here.
So how’s that free posting and server upgrade dealie coming?
Some enjoy posting provocative OPs, then sitting back and watching the carnage.
Some do not mind creating pointless additional work for the staff.
Some are demonstrably disinterested in fighting ignorance.
Some do not respond to repeated warnings by moderators.
Where all 4 of the above apply, I opine that a suspension or ban is in order. It seems like a no-brainer to me.
Yeah. Talk about finishing what you start…
:rolleyes:
Now that’s funny.
This board has always taken a posters body of work into account. With the one glaring exception, I have no problems with the SE suspension. Kudos to Frank for saying what we all knew. I think there are some moderation problems here these days but SE isn’t one of them, imho.