Should I stay or leave? (trolls or no trolls?)

who should go?

  • Ed goes

  • the trolls go - make no trolling a site policy!!

Results are only viewable after voting.
edX

edX

mac shaman
it is with deep regret that i make this post. in light of the recent increase of trolling and flaming and bickering repetitvely, i have reached the point where moderating is no longer tolerable for me. it takes more time than i should be spending. it leaves me feeling drained and depressed with little energy for posts of my own. (and some of you know that is very out of character for me ;) )

so what i am asking the members of this community is this - should i go or should the trolls? i just can't handle the responsiblity of following a handful of pissy whiners around the site all day, every day.

i am not talking about those of you who have honest disagreements nor those of you make a negative comment where it is appropriate and then let it be. Most of you know i enjoy a good debate as much as the next person. i am talking about the trolls who have nothing new to say and say it over and over. the ones whose posts this week read just like the ones last week and the week before. the ones that bash mac users for enjoying their computers. the ones who think a day of bitching and flaming is a fun way to spend their otherwise dull day. I know who they are. you know who they are. i think most of them know who they are.

I realized how badly this has been getting to me when the site was closed. one side of me missed the site and said "how could Scott do that?" And the other side jumped for joy that i got a whole day without having to read the drivel that has dominated this forum lately.

so you decide. at the risk of being called fascist and controlling, should we get tougher on trolls or should i step down and let someone else have to face this? and by tougher, i mean suspend or ban them from the site altogether. i spend way too much time editing their posts and arguing in pm's with these people as it is. because i believe in free speech, i have given these people friendly warnings when they deserved official ones. perhaps i have created some of this myself by not being more tight fisted in the beginning with them since i value diversity and try to give everyone a chance. and while they have learned to abide by the technical aspects of the policy here, they have never cared to abide by its spirit.

to be clear i am not talking about my leaving the site out of protest about anything. i will still be around. i just don't want to waste my time and mental health arguing fine lines with people who are (in my perception) just trying to stir things up for their own amusement.

so speak up now or live with the decision of those who do.
 
I think you take your job as moderator a little too seriously and to the extreme Ed. I know a lot goes on in the background as you mentioned with PMs and such that we don't realize but based on my dealings with you, I honestly feel you are way too uptight, biased and unjust. Maybe that just comes with being the heavy for too long.

It's no fun being the whistle blower and perhaps it's just not the job for you. I certainly wouldn't want to be the one cracking down on people who use the word sh*t all day.

I think perhaps you are too quick to pass judgement and jump to conclusions. For example, you gave me a warning for implying a user "wasn't thinking." What the hell was that honestly about? The discussion never turned into a flame war but you were there chastising me before I guess you thought it would? Maybe you should backoff and see where discussions go before cracking down on the first sign of "trouble."

Anyway, I know you think I have it out for you but that's not the case. If a vote against you comes up, know it wasn't from me. Being a moderator I'm sure you can probably see that for yourself though.

You're holding on too tight Maverick...You've lost the edge. ;)
 
uoba - that would be the ed goes option. you can't get entirely rid of me that easily. :D
 
Oops, sorry... okay, then go Ed, run free... (look at him run, and who said he couldn't be released back into the community):D
 
I see this as a troubleshooting site with a lot of great posters. I don't know why I'd wanna discuss the status quo of my Mac's hardware vey day, and hearing the same arguments all the time...I say the troll go and Ed stays...
 
Bottom line, we need our moderators, I like my comfort
We dont need the trolls...

Vote:
moderators = 1
Trolls = 0

No more questions?

Trolls go.

BTW: Been on the web for a long time and this is the first Forum I do participate
in because of all the relevant and interesting post from a lot of good participants.
I get fun in here as well as good ressources.. Sorry for my saying but F%$#K
those who are just here for passing time, I am here to learn and share.

-Sighter
 
the problem with this is: what to do against trolls. ban them when they begin to troll?

moderate their posts?

While it would solve the problem, it could lead to new problems.

I have seen similar situations on other forums, and honestly, it always had an impact on the whole community. When you let them troll as they want, they are ruining the community.
when you moderate them, you run the risk of "over-moderating". It happens. When you start moderating posts, you will do errors, like everybody of us does errors, which again can lead to even more flame wars.

It's a very hard decission and it needs a good moderator to master such a situation. While I believe that you are a great moderator, Ed, if you are at the point that you ask yourself and the community if you should stay or not, I think you are at a point where you should "step away" from it, that's why I voted "Ed goes", but I do not mean permanently. Maybe for a week, so you get some distance again. So that you don't have to visit the forum every evening just to read more and more trolls messages. In such a situation, you can quickly loose fun on the forum and see it as a something which causes you trouble.

I'd say take two or three days off of the forum, take some deep breaths and then come back and see if it is actually that bad or if it was just "too much" for you as a moderator in the past.

Such breaks sometimes work wonder.

Then again, this is just my opinion.

On the long run, I'd say stay, the forum needs good moderators, but not because we want you to stay but because you want to stay.

After all it's you freetime you are spending to moderate the forum, so it should be you who wants to be on this forum, you should still have fun in beeing a moderator.
 
I did not have the time to read any of this thread, but I just wanna say, what the Admin did yesterday really !@#$ed me off. I did not do anything against Apple, and yet i got punished. Me and the other 8000 members of this forum...
 
I guess I don't see the big dilemma here. If asosx was ever right about anything, it's that you guys take yourselves way too seriously.

If someone is going to troll here, it's been my experience that multiple posters will jump on his/her case. Why anyone feels singularly responsible for keeping the peace or editing posts (other than for obscenities) is beyond me.

My advice: either loosen up or do everyone a favor and let it go. This place is getting downright morbid, and not because of the trolling - the admin decisions and conclusions drawn in the last two days are enough to turn me off for a good long time.

I pride myself, not only as a Mac user, but as a human, on my objectivity. A holier-than-thou admin attitude is no better than an obnoxious troll's spewings. While I usually dislike Mac zealots who will blissfully deny any Apple shortcomings and blindly bash Windows just for the sport of it, I have tolerated it more than usual because I tend toward that view (just not so extreme) and given the community/purpose of this site. But it's all gotten way out of hand.

Maybe we should all just be frequenting Windows sites and lobbing a few grenades in there the way trolls here see fit to do.
 
This is a contentious time. I've only been a member of this site for around 3+ hours now, but I do follow a whole bunch of Mac websites. And the general zeitgeist of Mac-land hasn't a terribly good vibe to it right now. Some people are pissed off, well and truly. One might venture that there are significant splits in the Mac community, such as it is.

These will be resolved and we can all go back to discussing prefpanes and the like.

In the meantime, I'm sure plenty of people will give you good reasons (based on more site-specific stuff) to keep you in the mix.

eshine&eshine
 
Ed, i think you should stay.

trolls will be trolls. they come and go like that. it's the same at any forum i've ever spent time at. now we've had our run-ins in the past, but i hope you know that i'm not a troll, just a guy that disagrees with the popular posters sometimes.

anyways, i repeat, you should stay. moderate them if you have to. i'd suggest (i've done some mod work elsewhere in the past) that you warn them first, via PM. if that does no good, resort to banning. editing posts just doesn't look good. it makes a board look like it's run by the gestapo. and we don't want that here, right? :waits for a chorus of amen's:

you're a good guy Ed, and you do a good job here. i'm sad to see you considering leaving your duties over this. i think you're taking things a bit too far. just re-think your job a bit, but please don't leave. you're good to us, and we need a nice, level-headed mod like you. :)
 
Look, if the long time Apple buying public (read:ME) getting upset and discouraged by seriously lackluster releases counts as being a "troll", then by all means get out while you still have your sanity.

But I don't see many trolls here. Most of what I see are loyal Apple lovers who are vocal when their favorite computer company delivers a computer way below expectations, and months later than when it should have debuted (hell, the 1.25ghz DP won't even ship until the end of Sept. at the earliest!).

It's called SPEAKING ONES MIND, and I thought it was the purpose of a forum to allow that to happen, whether it be praise or criticism.

I must admit, that after the Admin shut down for the 24 hours that I was really peeved as well. I'm teetering on the edge of spending my time in another forum, where the admin won't act like a 5 year old when the level of criticism reaches a certain level, and take his toys (this forum) and go home.

I could say more, but I've already said it on my site Mac OS Xcentric .
 
I want Ed to stay... But if this work takes up to much time and when it doesn't feel rewarding then I can't blame him for wanting to resign.

I've been on this forum for some time now, I visit regularly but I don't post if I don't really have some thing to say. In my opinion there's to much nonsense around, more so now then it was. I feel like there's not much substance left in the forum. There's a lot of flaming, stupid remarks etc going on. I wish that people would just post when they have something to say. There is places on this forum for 'chatting' and that's where you can do that. I'd like to see the tech forums with less meaningless blabber.

And about Ed, in my opinion he's a good moderator, he's fair and have good judgment as far as I have seen. It's always hard to play the police role and controlling others, try to figure out where to draw the line. So cut him some slack and give him some appreciation for the work he does on his own free time.

And while I'm at it, Cut apple some slack too. They have given us some great things, appreciate that and stop whining. They can't reinvent the wheel every time.

For a better and more pleasant macosx.com

Viktor

note.
maybe it would be good with moderators taking turns 'moderating' a week each, like that maybe the moderators won't get burned out so fast, just a thought.
 
And while I'm at it, Cut apple some slack too. They have given us some great things, appreciate that and stop whining. They can't reinvent the wheel every time.
Click to expand...

I don't think anybody here who is disappointed with the latest desktops expects Apple to "reinvent the wheel" for each release. Pro users have a legitimate beef. Apple finally releases desktops with DDR SDRAM, and it's implemented in a half arsed way. Couple this with CPU speeds that below what just about everybody expected, and throw in a real ugly front for the new machine, and you've got legitimate complaints. Even the graphics cards aren't of pro level yet - and they still use the AGP4x bus.

Users of Apple's consumer line don't seem to understand the dilema the pro users are in. Most of us love Apple, it's OS (especially 10.2), and it's hardware/software synergy. But Pro users need their machine to MAKE MONEY. If I have a Lightwave scene that I render, and it takes 30-45 secs. longer on the Mac, and you are constantly rendering all day long, it starts to become painfully obvious that a machine you paid twice as much for isn't providing you with 2x the productivity.

This is an abstract example, but it's a valid one. Pro users need the latest and greatest to stay ahead of their competition. I bought a G4.800/DP last year. I was ready to buy a 1.4ghz machine this year if one was available. I am prepared to spend $$$ on the latest hardware if it will help me make $$$. But this iternation of the Pro line does not make financial sense for me to purchase. So now I have to wait for the next revision, which could come another 8 months from now, if Apple keeps it's current Pro upgrade schedule.

With this, I have to make choices - do I continue to wait for Apple to deliver a Pro machine worthy of my money, or do I throw together a Wintel box for my needs.

Now, temper this with some praise for Apple. On the consumer front, they are firing on all cylinders. The iApps are amazing. OS X is finally what everybody expected the next gen OS to be. The iBooks and iMacs are very cool machines.

But being a Pro user, I'm seriously disappointed. I'm no troll. I'm no pollyanna either. Apple has probably gotten more money from me in the last year than most of you over the last 10 years, so I'm secure in knowing where I stand. But I'm not gonna whistle past the graveyard, either...
 
Ed--> Good.

Trolls--> Bad.

Well that sums it up. **lightly pressing trapdoor button**

Bye Bye Trolls.. back to the place you came from.
 
I'd like to see Ed stay. His wit and intelligence pleasantly surprise me day to day, even if we've disagreed in the past.

I understand being a Moderator is a tough and thankless job sometimes, but it's a responsibility, and I think that when times get rough or things don't go the way you'd like to see them go, jumping ship isn't the best solution. Life is tough, and trolls are a fact of life. The Mac community has devoted followers, a few very devout users, some cultish-types, some indifferent types, and then the trolls... and the trolls outnumber our meager numbers one-hundred fold. It's a shame they found their way to this forum, but they're here, and like it or not, they provide an alternate viewpoint for many of us who are more religious in our devotion to Apple than realistically bound.

Apple has it's faults, and even though the trolls don't present their viewpoints in a very productive manner, they are opinions and viewpoints that must be taken in to consideration nonetheless...

I've been a member of this forum for over a year and have had my share of good times, bad times, and flat-out viscious disagreements. I would hate to see the people that I've come to know on this forum begin to leave -- we've already had a couple leave, and their input is missed at least by this forum member.

Don't go, Ed. Stick out the storm. Don't ban trolls -- they are good for something, and that's provising a differing point of view when we get TOO fanatical about Apple and they also incite us to dig a little deeper and think a little harder about what we write.
 
Ed,

Knowing that you are in graduate school, I don't know how you have time for your studies and time for moderating this site. Unless your one of those people who can spend little time reading and studying and retain and comprehend everything in one fell swoop, the task looks like a path to burnout. I've noticed that when I come around in the morning and the evening, your moderating is usually done throughout much of the day. I simply don't know how you do it. Unless this moderating is part of your reasearch project in psychology, I think it would be in your best interest to pass the moderating along to someone else for a while, possibly permanently. Your health and success in grad school aren't worth risking.

As for the trolls, they know who they are, they are fully cognizant of their intentions and actions, and should be banned from the site without warning. Given the goals of this site, a community of Macintosh members helping one another, we don't need and should not tolerate "THEIR KIND" here. This may seem a little extreme, but we don't need a bunch people arguing and stirring up ill feelings just for the goal of pissing-off the community. As I mentioned before, these people know what they are doing, and have intentions and well thought out plans for pushing other members buttons. I think the problem should be nipped in the bud, and dealt with swiftly and sternly. In this day and age, everyone knows or has a pretty good idea of netiquette. TROLLS ARE NOT WELCOME HERE.

Your brother,
 
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