Folks, we have a new member, jrobert1, who is here only to disrupt and annoy us. In fact, on my local forum, he broadcast what he is doing and is trying to get other members there to do the same thing. He has a thread, "Phucking up Foggy's forum" that is several pages long now. More of them may join and do the same thing. Trolls may show up from other places, too.

As you have seen, a lot of people (20 so far) have put him on ignore. They're not interested in reading his posts.

BUT IF YOU QUOTE HIS POST TO RESPOND TO HIM, THEN ALL THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE HIM ON IGNORE HAVE TO READ HIS POSTS ANYWAY.

Which is not being terribly considerate to the other people here. So I'm going to ask you:

1. Please don't respond to trolls at all, not ever, not any time, not in any thread; but if you DO feel compelled to respond, because for example the troll is holding a gun to your head, then
   
   
2. For doG's sake don't quote what the troll wrote, so you don't force everyone else to read it.

This is just common courtesy toward your fellow members of the Beloved Herd.


ALSO
I spent way too much time on PJ trying to explain that:

• You don't have to quote someone's post to respond to it, and,
  
  
• if you DO quote someone, you have the option of only quoting a small part of what they said. There's a key on your keyboard marked "Delete," and you can select all the text you don't want to quote, and use that key to delete it.
  
  
• What happens here every day is:
  
  
  1. one person will say something
     
     
  2. the next person will quote that post and add their own comment;
     
     
  3. the next person will quote both the previous people's posts and add a short comment;
     
     
  4. the next person will quote all three of the preceding posts, and add a short comment;
     
     
  5. and so on. If we're lucky, we'll get to read what the first person wrote EIGHT FUCKING TIMES before it ends.

That's a lesson that is obviously never going to sink in around here, so I'll just mention it and move on.

He's not a birther, so I'm not going to put him in the birther bin. He's not breaking the rules (so far), so I'm not giving him board warnings, and I'm not going to ban him. You're just going to have to deal with him. Myself, I'm ignoring him; he's not worth my time. If I'm going to flame him, I'll do it on my local forum, where the owner loves flame wars. I'm explaining about him in his threads to those of you who ARE worth my time, but I'm not directly addressing him.

But I'm fully aware that he's just here to try to turn Fogbow into an ugly place with a lot of ugly flame wars, like he and his friends did to my local forum. They caused a lot of good, smart, funny people to quit in frustration. The honest conservatives don't think much of them, but the owner is a libertarian and won't discipline them.

I'm not going to allow Fogbow to be a forum with flame wars, any more than Justin and I allowed that on PJ. It' perfectly OK, in fact, I would go so far as to say "in a perfect world," when he starts a really stupid, moronic annoying thread like he did last night, it would be best if NONE of you respond to him.

You may have heard the expression "Don't feed the trolls." I can't understand why so many people go right ahead and feed them anyway. Not feeding them really does work, y'know.

Carry on.

I don't understand why some folks INSIST on feeding the trolls, long after their "trollism" becomes obvious.

I do wonder, additionally, why someone who says they are intent on "Phuciking Up Foggy's Forum" is allowed to continue to post here. Why would you allow rotting garbage to pile up and stink up the whole house before taking it out?

I used to run a board which was proclaimed to be open and uncensored. And it was.

But occasionally we had terrorists come in and try to fuck it up.

So, we simply terminated their privileges, without any further comment, and banned their IP addies. We also prohibited people with proxy servers from joining.

Did it solve everything? No, but 99.44%.

So, whether this new terrorist is violating the rules or not, he has made his intentions clear elsewhere and he should simply go away without further folderol. As should any others who follow him here.

If you get my drift.

I was a member of a forum a few years ago wherein the admins had a neat feature. They could turn on a setting in the users account that would make their posts invisible to everyone except themselves. (like a secret global ignore) The troll would normally give-up after a couple of days of no one responding to anything they would post.

Oooh - I like it! Can we do it here? Huh, huh? Can we?

Neon, that is a great feature, it's just disappointing that some folks cannot ignore trolls on their own.

Good question.

EXCELLENT question.

Reasons, I haz three of them:

• It's a zen thing. I'm giving y'all an opportunity to work on your self-discipline, and become better people. If y'all can teach yourselves to read JROB's annoying posts and NOT RESPOND, you'll have reached a higher plane of consciousness, and be dang proud of yourselves later. I wouldn't deprive you of this great opportunity for all the horse mint in California.
  
  
• He really isn't a birther. He really isn't breaking the rules. I don't see him personally insulting any particular members of the board; in fact, I see other members of the board personally insulting him. He insults us as a group, it's true. Walk it off. You've been called worse things by better people. People have been calling me stupid for 8 years on various forums. The truth is, I'm smarter than I was 8 years ago, and I'm confident enough to let those things roll off me. This is still a place where we value free speech. If you don't respond to the truly stupid crap he likes to spout when he's drunk, who knows? Maybe someday he'll be sober and try to say something intelligent. I can't just ban everyone I don't like; I have to look at myself in the mirror every morning.
  
  
• I still play on the other local forum now and then. Here's the full original post from "Phucking up Foggy's forum" (to aid in your understanding, OMB is the boss over there. I coined it; it stands for "Our Mysterious Benefactor").
  
  jrobert1 wrote:
  I wonder how long we would last over on the LUNATIC FORUM if we went over there and caused a ruckus as he has done here?
  
  How long do you think it would take for the IDIOT to ban us?
  
  Maybe we should give it a try....and see how long we last..then report back to OMB and tell him to give DUMBAZZ the same amount of time here....
  
  Ideas?
  
  So you see, if I ban him here, he'll never let me hear the end of it over there, and I'll probably be posting over there for a long, long time, since I've met 40 of the members on that forum and have lifelong friends there who don't plan to join PJ. In fact, you chased one of them away for picking the wrong screen name when he joined PJ, Ms. Filly (Hinton Helper). I'm not saying your criticism was wrong, but that guy is no racist and in fact he's a very close friend of mine, regardless what screen name he chose. Other friends of mine don't post here either, but they are still at TFF, and I plan to be there a while. If I ban jrobert1 when he hasn't really broken any rules, why shouldn't he spend the next five billion years screaming at OMB that he should ban me in return?

Oh, the guy who randomly chose the name of a virulent racist as a screen name? Who knew?

If you're ok with allowing people to come in here who have expressly stated their intention to totally fuck up your forum, that's your right, I suppose. It's just a shame to allow a good forum be destroyed because folks might whine about you elsewhere.

"Duke" has meanings other than a reference to a professional-grade racist.

Here in the heart of NC, to some "Duke" means "New Jersey South".

So, we have a rule against responding to trolls but no rule against being a troll?

Kewl.

That clears it up for me Foggy.

We have banned folks for lying, but when a troll begins a thread to falsely accuse us of persecuting Christians, we should turn the other cheek?

Got it.

We will debunk bullshit morons say on other websites but not on our own?

Okay.

You're the boss.

Gotta tell you... that's not really easy to do. So far this guy has been such a tiny annoyance that frankly I never even noticed him him until Foggy brought him to my attention in this thread. And now, I'm going to play with him for a while.

Have fun! I love to watch.

To each his own. I don't see anything positive coming from it, but knock yourself out.

^^^ what Stern said

I'm a light handed mod for several reasons. I believe we're all adults here in his collegial environment. We're self-policing anyway. I think the only thing I've ever asked to be changed was the use of the C word - and then I got so mad at some birther I used it myself

I worked at a blog where trolls, thread jackers and even just negative commenters were yanked immediately, no explanations. It was the blog owner's right to have that policy in order to keep the focus on the blog posts and not personalities, but it was very heavy handed. I don't want to do that again. I wish we could not feed trolls, but as one of the offenders, I don't have much cred there. They drop a comment that pushes my button, just as they intended, and off I go.

I can't put them on ignore, but I can ignore them. And I'm gonna. Mostly. Except for modly things. Maybe.

I concur with Stern. I really feel that deliberate trolling and continued purposeful disruption should be a bannable offense. It's not a matter of censorship -- it's a matter of behaving like an adult in a forum where children are not invited.

If you want to keep them and play with them, then make a cage under the bridge and out of site (and sight) where you can put them. While a lot of us may have them on ignore, anyone who's not yet a member coming into TFB to check it out sees it all, and can't follow our conversations.

I used to have what Neonzx describes on my chat server -- a command called /shun which could be applied to a disruptive user. After he was shunned, only he saw his posts and it just looked like everyone else was ignoring him.

If phpBB 3 doesn't have such a mod, maybe someone in the phpBB development community could be persuaded to write one. It's one of the most effective troll controls I've ever seen.

We're never going to settle that one, TF. Hinton Helper wrote an ANTI-slavery book, crusaded against slavery, and didn't become a white supremacist until after the Civil War. That does not, and will not change the fact that I know the person who used that name one hell of a lot better than I know most people here. I've spent many, many hours with him, drinking beer and settling the problems of society. I've been reading his thoughts for almost 8 years. He teaches comparative religion and world history at a local high school, and his wife designs children's clothing. He's extremely popular with the kids of all races at that school; I know because I get a lot of business when prom time rolls around, because the whole school knows I'm a friend of his, and they come in and tell me how much they like him. He's a wonderful, wonderful, intelligent scholar and friend, and the very idea that I'd give up a friend because he chose an unfortunate screen name is unthinkable to me, especially since that's the only thing you know about him. If he's a racist, I'm a chihuahua.



I'll consider changing the rules, maybe. I'll have to think about it.

Can you please have a special designation for the trolls I can't be arsed to figure it out on my own.

Ok, THAT one you have to explain ...

While writing, I missed some of the posts. Raicha in particular makes a lot of sense to me. So does ducktape, and even Sterngard, who I sometimes discount on account of him bein' such a grump.

Folks, you know that I always listen to both sides and consider carefully before making a decision, and I try to make decisions in the best interest of the board. If I decide to ban him, I can take the heat over on my local forum. In fact, it just might be exciting some.

Gimme until tonight to ponder this, and keep posting your thoughts without regard to pissing me off, because you don't piss me off and maybe I was only looking at one side of things.

I got to get some work done. Please don't quote the trolls while I go think things over. Then I'll come back and read this thread again, and maybe lance the boil.

A Story.

I had a neighbor whose house I used to visit regularly.

Then my neighbor bought some dogs. A lot, actually.

He allowed his dogs to play in his front yard. They used to shit regularly on his lawn. My neighbor would walk out to his front yard and play with his dogs. He wasn't careful about stepping in the shit. And he did. A lot.

He would then go back into his house without taking off his shoes, tracking the shit through his house.

He didn't clean it up because he was afraid his dogs would be offended. After all, they enjoyed the smell.

I stopped visiting my neighbor.

The End.

Ignorance. I thought the troll that got banned was "Duke Supporter", who's sports thread quite quickly degenerated into pure troll. I was blissfully unaware of "Hinton Helper".

As to the "New Jersey South" = "Duke", it's sports-related and a direct dig at Coach K and his propensity to play high profile games in New Jersey, the perception being that it harms rivals UNC and NCSU.

Here's my 2 cents: He's here for one reason, to cause as much trouble as possible to get you (Foggy) to ban him, so he can go back to your local forum and cry that you banned him, so you should be banned from the local forum.

He's not here to learn, he's not here to educate, he's not here to have fun. He's here to set a "trap" for you, so you can be banned from the forum he prefers. And in the process, he will probably piss off a few people here. (Not me, I've ignored him).

Fuck 'im. Toss his ass out and let him go play in someone else's sandbox.