Serious community failure - forum reporting

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#1

we have a serious problem in the community: trolls have the ability to close threads.
they can wait a few hours, and close them again, and we have no tools to do anything about it.

a recent quote from a troll:

I take zero responsible if you get this thread closed for a period of time by reporting me - I can’t be at fault for something others are doing.

the troll is right! it is the action of REPORTING a troll that is causing the trouble! we should not, CANNOT, fear to use the report button. this particular troll actively spouts hate speech, and is polluting the entire forum. closing the threads they pollute is not helping, as they just move on, and then the threads re-open anyway.

i request, as an immediate interim fix, to stop closing threads temporarily. if possible, ban a USER from posting for 24h.

and of course, ACTUAL active forum moderation would help.

19 Likes
Community meeting on IRC 26th October 2023
Re-organisation of Jolla company
#2

It’s the 2nd time I’m seeing this happening here. The first time, it took way too long before the poster took the hint, and their questionable contributions are now polluting the forums as well as patchmanager’s web catalog.

I have been doing online communication for a long time now. This shit has always been happening both on classical forums and so-called social media (so-me). It needs to be dealt with, and usually so-me does it more effectively. Although I’m sure one of the reasons for the creation of Discourse was to deal better with trolls.

One thing that is different here is that the forum account is linked to your (paid) device account.

I don’t have a solution either but I’m sure Discourse would lend itself to some tweaking without putting too much stress on mods & admins.

1 Like
#3

It seems like locking a topic for a while is more suited to cooling off a flame war than dealing with a disruptive member. In the latter case, the troll is effectively launching a DOS attack.

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#5

And from the appearance of a hidden reply, I think we’re gonna have an example of the exact problem right here and right on schedule . . .

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#7

I just memorize a few names and avoid reading whatever they do

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#9

If the community is allowed to flag a post in negative way, then why is the community not allow to flag the same post in positive way. It would give at least a sense for democracy.
The way it works now is far from democratic.

The other thing is that you must define what troll and trolling is. For me trolling is inserting personal opinion no one asked for. Why I am inserting now my personal opinion, because I am proposing to give right to users to unflag flagged posts and appeal to everybody to write here only about Sailfish.

This would be great start.

1 Like
#10

One workaround is to put ignore in your preferences/users.

#11

Isn’t the “like this post”-function (:heart:) exactly that? It is even better than flagging, because everyone can see how many likes post has gained, where as flags are not seen by normal users until it goes over some internal value and the post is hidden?

1 Like
#12

I too had a very informative if sensitive comment just hidden.

I’m a psychotherapist with 25 years clinical experience. Two of the people I’ve talked to in PMs come across as certifiably schizophrenic ie in DSM V and I don’t talk to many people here. One was talking about murder. I reported him to Jolla, not easy to do and they don’t have time to deal with such things.

I’m not talking about JGP666, have not talked to him and leave the ‘satanic’ comment to people’s interpretation.

The nature of Sailfish means that it will attract cranks and lots of them aren’t very good socially. They often come across as egotistical but might well be insecure, even paranoid.

Attacking them isn’t actually helpful. If you empathise, ask them questions, you’re likely to get a better response and they may well out their ‘craziness’. In an ideal world, such people would be accommodated and helped to get better.

We actually live in a world that doesn’t help schizophrenic people much. Instead, it actively encourages pretty notable delusions. Such places can make schizoprhenic people feel more normal. I would strongly recommend clamping down on political talk re: Russia, but there are other obvious topics to do this with: US politics, Israel, COVID etc.

Another possibility is volunteer moderation. I would expect this problem to get worse over time

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#13

Yes, but it has a different meaning and function, so it would be nice of the (:heart:) would count countering the flagging.

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#14

I would assume highly liked post has pretty low chance to be flagged into oblivion and vice versa, but that is just me.

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#15

I’ve had the crazy-cray-crays flag a couple of my posts. IMO, putting the lunatics in charge of the asylum isn’t a great plan, even if done accidentally by automated mod-bots. Curing mental illness is not the foundational purpose of this forum, AFAIU, and is definitely beyond the scope of my training and experience.

2 Likes
#16

Optimism always drove the world forward… :rofl:

#17

You got by yourself the loop of your reasoning. Therefore, I am trying to give you a different point of view: your are not forced to read everything everyone writes and moreover, you are not forced to write an answer or judge/rate their posting.

Ok, some content can be awful - and also unlawful - but I did not saw anything like that here. Just opinions, we might like or not. On the other side, some technical post might be wrong. Correct them - if you can - or just ignore them. OK, some technical content can be dangerous - and also unlawful - but I did not saw anything like that here. Just suggestions that might work or might not work, like SFOS.

Minimal action principle: less is more.

#18

A very good suggestion - Not only here, also at the pub on Friday night. Try to empathize with people instead of correcting them, instead of answering to win an argument. Ask them questions to understand them not only their argument and not for judging them.

Said on the other words, stay focused on the “people” side of the conversation. Follow this suggestion and practice it for a while and one day or night - suddenly - you might end-up into a sentimental relationship possibly also with a human female… :rofl:

Or said in another way: accept that your referring human model is just a fictional character and in the real world he would probably get diagnosed inside the autism spectrum.

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Long live and peace! :wink:

#19

No, that is not the case: The two mechanisms (flaggings an likes) are unrelated.

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#20

Unless, you had spoken with them in real blood-and-flesh person, they could have been also an AI or trolls. Video call, also does not grant anything about it. The competition in faking people on video calls between AI and human mimic is just begun and every of the two sides are reinforcing each others like a human chess-master playing chess with a learning DeepBlue. We - humans - have four thousand years of theater experience at our side but AI are damn faster.

I have a great consideration of people with a long-term experience. However, I also know that their experience is a huge cognitive bias, whatever they are aware about it or not. Experience is a tinted lens: more experience, more tinted. I did not like very much “Awareness” the film available on Amazon Prime, but I found insightful the last 20 minutes. Unfortunately, I do not know if someone else can get the same perspective just watching the last 20 minutes, only. Because I know (the whole film), I do not know (about the last 20 minutes, only). :wink:

By the way, returning back to the incipit. We live in a historical moment in which anything we cannot touch in person might not exist at all. Welcome in Wonderland, Alice! :face_with_hand_over_mouth:

Edit: for a Wonderland quick trip, check here… :rofl:

#21

I fully agree with you (also with the rest of your post. This is exactly why I am nagging around. I want to have technical, factual opinions and not the personal thoughts of anybody. This here is not a psychotherapy. So usually I would ask someone to stop polluting the area with thought not related to Sailfish. I think it is not too much. The other part is the self righteousness, but this is completely different topic (not related to Sailfish :slight_smile: )
This was similar on the Debian UL until we rebelled and they cleaned up the place. Now it is a bit boring, but very technical and focused.

BR

BR

1 Like
#22

Pros and cons… :wink:

#23

Quite the understatement. :wink:

Accommodating everyone who can be helpful is what I’d like but we are obviously very limitied.

Encouraging people to have a healthy attitude to the forums, to SF, to coding etc is something we definitely can individually do.
But who is going to?

I think volunteer moderation is the way forward. Moderators can work together to understand where people are at, why they’re not coming across as they want to etc.

The troll flagging could be limited to people who have eg < 1 in 20 flagged posts, but this would need the guy who created this nice forum software. Heck, we haven’t even been able to get a Dalvik subforum in the last few years.

1 Like