i dont think i need to bring to the mods attention the boards general disapproval of a certain poster. all of you have been in threads he's posted in, or made before. we all have.

but i dont know about all of you, but i know i'm sick of all of it. not just his responses; i'm sick of someone going after him and then someone else, smelling blood, starts in, and provokes the guy. granted, a lot of his posts are creepy, and do deserve some manner of mocking, but frankly, i think its about time we cut the guy a bit of slack. threads like his latest had nothing to do with his particular hobby, nor his creepy postings in the past; he was just asking questions.

so i guess my question for the staff is this: can we lay down the law in some way in all this? atleast, can we do something to get everyone to lay off a bit? its starting to look uncomfortablly like netbullying at times. and thats something i dont ever want to see at the Allspark.

I've actually thought that exact thing tonight while reading that thread. There's really only one person that digs into him often. I just try and ignore it, like I do most of his more.....odd? comments.

Honestly I think the guy possibly has some type of mental/social disorder so I just try and ignore it.



evisceration? man that's a harsh punishment.

Lol.

you saw nothing.

Sadly easier said than done. Partially the problem (if you will) is how the questions/responses are phrased, and then there's that little sticky of the other posters' interpretation/reactions to said questions/responses.

If said offensive poster would just go away and stop posting, so would said problems. The entire point of his posts (as it is with a few others) is to provoke someone into flaming them so they can play the wounded innocent offended. Sadly, the admins don't seem to be inclined to deal with his flame-baiting.

Given your recent conduct, Bob, I don't think you ought to be participating in a thread about bullying people. You're part of the problem here and I don't care what your opinion of another member is...it doesn't excuse you being a jerk. That goes for everyone on this board.

Now, that being said, if you guys have examples of posts you feel are deliberate attempts by someone to cause problems or invite attacks, please report them to us so we can be aware and take action.

It's not "bullying" to point out when someone is around exclusively to troll, or is being dumb. You don't treat someone nicely if they can't behave properly. You set them straight. For that matter, the "rules" (using the term loosely) about not doing such seem to be inconsistently applied...as is usual. Some people get warned for calling others out for stupidity, while others don't. That upsets me more than the tolerance of the behavior that deliberately provokes it in the first place.

People have been reporting these, and yet nothing has been done. Let's be frank: no one could be stupid enough to post the kind of jive that this person who shall remain nameless does. He/she/it posts only to provoke a reaction from others. Why this hasn't been dealt with is beyond me.

No, you don't set them straight, not in the manner you have chosen to do so recently and not on this board. If you have a problem, report it. And I guarantee you the staff spends a ridiculous amount of time arguing and debating about things that get reported, trying to decide if something is worthy of a warning or needs to be dealt with. Are we going to consider every single reported post an offense? No, of course not.

We do our best to be consistent and fair, but that doesn't mean we are going to consistently AGREE with your personal opinion. Keep in mind that we may not like how someone acts or what they post, but if they're not blatantly breaking a rule, we aren't generally going to warn them or suspend their account.

Bottom line, stop this attitude that you're entitled to put people in their place...that's not your job here.

It's been pointed out before that this isn't my "opinion". The fact is that some posters are breaking the rules about flame-baiting by deliberately posting stupid jive to provoke a reaction from people.

This still hasn't answered the question of why the rules aren't applied consistently, either. Plenty of people - including myself - have gotten warnings for innocuous things, while others haven't been warned from calling other posters "douchebags", etc. Why is that?

You know, I'm not even going to continue to argue this. My point stands: there are some serious questions about how the rules are applied around here.

Show me where someone got off without a warning for calling someone a douchebag. They either got a warning or we're in the process of discussing how to handle it, or we didn't see it. If things get reported they get dealt with (assuming they are clear violations).

Flamebaiting is a very subjective thing. You may think something is flamebaiting, but someone else may read it and think "that was just a normal question". I'm sorry if you feel that we aren't dealing with something the way you'd like, but you have a staff of close to 20 people who discuss problems and the best way to deal with something. This isn't one person disagreeing on something, it's a consensus of people who do their best to keep this place running.

Just because someone might have what you would believe to be a really really really really, like ridiculously, stupid opinion of something, does not mean that they're "intentionally flamebaiting." They could just really be that stupid. And everyone is free to think anyone else is as stupid as they'd like to, but when one user calls another user stupid, that's the person who's crossed the line.

It's a fine line between babying idiots and permitting abusive behavior. While we don't want to do either, the abusive behavior is much more clear-cut and gets acted on more. There is to date no real accurate way to tell if someone is intentionally provoking the board by being stupid, or if they're just stupid. But if you call someone stupid, it's clear-cut every time that you're calling someone stupid, which is why that gets handled much more efficiently.

Believe me, we're just as frustrated as everyone else about the situation, specifically *because* we're trying to apply a level of consistency and standards for user conduct. We're trying to be fair about the rules we've set on this board so that we don't railroad anyone, whether we personally appreciate their viewpoints or not. I was on other sites in the past where sometimes people just got "disappeared" and were never spoken of again. I much prefer this system for all its flaws to one where it feels like you can't have more open discussion. The only things we disallow here are outright personal attacks (and curse words, but the hilarity of the swear filter makes up for it as far as I'm concerned!), which I think is pretty reasonable, all things considered.

Shut up Galen. You're stupid.

Oh, I'm SO reporting you for that.

Too bad we don't have an ignore feature, which would allow people to block posts they don't want to see.

Oh wait....

^ Wait for what? ;-]


Your friend, TSM-in-N.Y.


"And the flowers are still standing!"


EDIT: Forgot the "?"

Gee, after I publicly called the staff out on inconsistency, it got a warning. A little too convenient, isn't it? I seriously doubt that before I mentioned it no one on the staff read the thread it happened in and that it would've taken that long to "discuss" whether it's an insult or not. If I hadn't pointed out the imbalance there, I doubt it would have gotten a warning at all. We've seen this kind of thing slip by enough times before.

As for the poster(s) this applies to, I think it's pretty bleeding obvious whether someone's being intentionally and willfully stupid or not. Really, it's not hard to tell. No one could be that over the top.

You flatter yourself. The "douchebag" comment in question was obviously a flame, it actually was noted by a staff member before you brought it up here, and a warning was logged less than 24 hours after the infraction.

I'm sorry it didn't happen fast enough for you, but really, if you want to help out instead of just gloating about how nothing gets done without you... click the "Report" button. It's always possible that a post sneaks by the mods for a little while. The way to fight that is not by complaining about it in the thread, nor by posting conspiracy theories in here, but just by saying "Hey, did you see this?"

Wait, are you upset at inconsistency that would theoretically let you flame this user, or are you upset because people who flame get warned for it? If you want to flame someone, you'll get called out on it, probably warned. If you don't want to flame someone, then what's the problem?

I'm sorry, but I'm confused here. Are you seriously trying to tell me that the biggest, most pressing issue of your day is whether or not this staff takes a little time to make sure we make the right move and in a timely enough manner that it meets with your personal approval? Not like you need to know, but the staff discussion on the post you're claiming inconsistency on was started a couple of hours before you joined this conversation, and in fact got the exact end result you're clamoring for. Talk about playing the wounded innocent offended.

Y'know why things sometimes happen slower than you might like? For that consistency you claim to care about. You might not always like the staff's decisions, and they may not necessarily always be correct or consistent, but we try damn hard to talk things through, to see both sides of every issue, to make ourselves available for feedback and comments on the process, and for people to ask questions. The amount of transparency about user behavior on this site is ridiculously high compared to just about any other site out there. We try as best we can to get it as right as possible, and to create an environment where people don't think they'll suffer just because of staff whims.

I'm sorry Bob, but it seems to me like what you really want is permission to abuse someone on the site so long as they're deemed, by you alone, to be sufficiently stupid enough to warrant it. And that's not how this site works. You might think "no one can be that over the top," but frankly that's not your call to make.

Thank you for registering your complaints. Any further questions or discussion can be sent to any staffer over PM or via email to admin@allspark.com. Thank you for registering your complaints, they've been received and understood.