[helene_t]

A BBO friend of mine recently said that it's a shame that most of the good players on BBF have migrated to (name of some other bridge forum goes here).

I objected: PhilKing and MikeH and Fluffy and AWM are still here. FrancesHinden and JLOGIC and MickyB and Gnasher occasionally. And a couple of others.

But it's true that we are in a bit of a recession at the moment. So I started thinking about what the reason might be.

I think that the direct cause is the trolling, and the inadequate reactions on trolling from certain members. Some members try to bully the trolls out. In my opinion it is a bad strategy. I know how difficult it is - you get involved in a dispute with a troll before you realise that s/he is a troll. Once you are dragged into the dispute it is difficult to leave without having the feeling that you gave the troll the last word. This is especially true if you have a feeling that the troll might not be recognised as such by your peers. Maybe the reason why I am able to restrain myself from troll-bashing is that I don't feel so strongly about bridge and global warming - and the subjects that I really feel about, like evolutionary biology, are not targeted by trolls at the moment.

Long time ago I promised myself to ignore everything that just has the slightest smell of troll. I think I have largely kept that promise. I think it would be great if everybody did the same. Yes, newcomers might be led astray by some "expert" advice given by an ignorant if everybody else ignores it. But I think that won't happen too often and that it should be a minor concern compared to the negative consequences of the troll bashing:
- if you are a good player we need all the time you can spare for the real bridge discussions - please don't devote your scarce resources to troll bashing
- if I press "view new content" and see a long list of headlines that look like bridge discussion, but turn out to be trolling and troll-bashing, it puts me off and I start thinking of leaving to (name of other bridge forum goes here).
- even if I manage to find some troll-free discussion to spend some time on, the trolling has already distracted me and put me in bad mood, so it will have a negative impact on the quality of my contribution.

In one respect I have not kept my promise: I continue to upvote the trollbashers whenever I agree with them and they phrase their troll-bashing in a witty way. But probably this contributes to the problem as well. Troll-bashing is a very easy way to earn upvotes.

Trollbashing feeds the trolls and rep feeds the trollbashers. So maybe it is time to get rid of the rep? Or maybe just for people like me to stop upvoting the troll bashing.

[1eyedjack]

I doubt that it would be a tie-breaker for anyone considering drifting away, but I feel that it wouldn’t hurt to upgrade the forum to the latest version of Invision. Sure there would be a modest cost involved, but I doubt it would be noticed By BBO. And if it was, I would be prepared to pitch in if enough others followed.

[broze]

I think there are just fewer trolls on BW because they have to use their actual names and so they don't quite have that shield of anonymity.

What caused jdonn to quit BBF btw?

[Vampyr]

 broze, on 2014-February-03, 16:30, said:

I think there are just fewer trolls on BW because they have to use their actual names and so they don't quite have that shield of anonymity.

What caused jdonn to quit BBF btw?

Maybe we should be required to use our real names, at least in our profiles?

[Scarabin]

Forgive me if I am being naive but I am puzzled by the general sentiment against trolls. I would classify many posts as trolling even though the authors would probably deny any such intention and I frequently enjoy reading posts I would class as trolling.

I tend however to object to carping at minor points in posts and completely negative posts that seem to be activated by malevolence.

Some posters seem to view any post that seeks a reaction as trolling but surely no one writes a post hoping it will be ignored? I can see that hi-jacking a topic could be considered trolling.

If my present post is an example of trolling then I can only say it's not intended as such and it's completely sincere. I would really like to understand this.

[barmar]

 1eyedjack, on 2014-February-03, 14:09, said:

I doubt that it would be a tie-breaker for anyone considering drifting away, but I feel that it wouldn’t hurt to upgrade the forum to the latest version of Invision. Sure there would be a modest cost involved, but I doubt it would be noticed By BBO. And if it was, I would be prepared to pitch in if enough others followed.

Cost isn't the issue, AFAIK.

[32519]

Here's some free advice:

Learn from the likes of Zel - attack the post, not the poster. As soon as you start attacking the poster it becomes a question of, "who gets in the last word."

[32519]

This was mikeh’s take on your thread back in 2011:

 mikeh, on 2011-October-06, 11:14, said:

I recently read a suggestion that may be self-evidento to many others who post here, but which got me to thinking.

The suggestion was that we see flame wars on the internet to a far greater degree than ever arise in real life largely because in real life, our exchanges are moderated by non-verbal cues. In most one on one discourse, we convey and receive many non-verbal cues that serve to lessen or modify the negative meaning we might otherwise draw from the mere words, while on-line we read the words and impose on them a meaning that arises more from our state of mind than it does any perception of what the author meant.....often were we to see the facial expression or the body language or hear the tone of voice, we would perceive a different meaning and perhaps not so readily take offence. Furthermore, these non-verbal cues operate as a sort of dampening feedback loop, minimizing the risk of a misunderstanding leading to escalation.

As one of those who undoubtedly irritates a number of posters, and who all too often gets irritated myself, this idea, which may seem obvious to others, made me metaphorically step back and look at how I behave on this forum, and how I perceive those whose posts occasionally annoy me.

As one example, there is a certain poster to whose ideas I often respond critically.....I shall not name him, but he is rumoured to be the best theorist on BBF. I suspect and maybe someday will learn that we'd get along fine over a beer or two....and that if we ever did, we'd still vigorously disagree but with perhaps more grace and humour than we do now...because we'd bring to each other's posts, as we read them, the real life impressions we have of the other, rather than merely the internal imagery we have created from reading our posts.

Now, the majority of posters seem to be able to avoid rudeness (either because they are nicer people than I am and/or they already instinctively or consciously understand this issue), and this post wouldn't have much relevance to them. I am definitely NOT trying to create more issues than already exist

So this post is partly a sort of apology to those I have annoyed, and will (alas) undoubtedly annoy in the future, and partly an invitation to others to either add to this thought or to suggest disagreement.

Perhaps this thread belongs in the WC, and, if so, I invite a moderator to move it.

This was your own contribution in that thread:

 helene_t, on 2011-October-06, 18:22, said:

In real life, when someone pisses me off, I rarely confront the person spontaneously. This is because I need time to consider an appropriate response. The more heated the conflict the more I have to lose by framing my position in a not-so-thought-through way. It usually takes a couple of hours before I have decided what an appropriate response would be. By that time, at least one of the two people involved is likely to have left the party. And otherwise the topic of discussion has changed so my response is no longer on-topic.

On the internet, when MikeH makes an annoying post, I can take my time to think through an appropriately toxic response and post it when it is still on-topic. In fact it typically takes a lot less than the two hours it might take it real life. This is because:
- I can afford not to be quite as thorough as I would have been IRL because if I make an ass of myself I can always edit it later.
- When in a toxic mood it is much easier to type than to talk because I don't have to worry about any non-verbal clues that might weaken my position, for example by betraying my lack of confidence in my own assertions. This is different when I want to make a friendly comment, in which case I am not worried about non-verbal clues.

So online communication makes it easier to be hostile and more difficult to be friendly.

So it would seem as though you too are not entirely innocent.

By all means go and read the whole thread again, Annoying posts: why do they happen?

[helene_t]

 Vampyr, on 2014-February-03, 17:01, said:

Maybe we should be required to use our real names, at least in our profiles?

Not practical. I suppose most of us use a credit card for buying BBO$ and that our profile could contain the name associated with that card, but then I just create a second bbo account and don't buy any BBO$ for that account.

[mycroft]

I am on That Other Site, but do not post. Why? Because I have several years of Internet History under my handle, and very very little under my real name (and most of that is either professional or very old history). And I very much like it that way, because google-searching is de rigeur for my industry, and I'd rather have nothing than "he's an IT specialist, but all he talks about is bridge". I see no reason to change that for them (or for G+, or for ...)

Also, my name is ... unique on the net ... and I have had death threats in the past. That I took seriously. They've *probably* forgotten about me (or don't care if they remember) by now...

[Zelandakh]

 mycroft, on 2014-February-05, 12:23, said:

Also, my name is ... unique on the net

Don't speak too soon. My name was unique on the internet having been made up in the mid-late 80s for a roleplaying game character. I have used the name online since 1990, mostly for games, bulletin boards and forums. However somewhere along the lines a chap in Wales decided to start using the same name. It is hard for me to imagine that he came up with the name independently so I can only assume it was copied - albeit luckily not in many places. So having a unique name is no guarantee - and mycroft strikes me as much more likely to be copied than Zelandakh!

As an aside to the comment in #8, I am not sure I can remember the last time I saw a flaming post from helene so a suggestion of guilt in this area seems a little over the top. As a further point, I can say from experience of online communities longer than almost anyone else that you achieve nothing by hanging around an online community that you do not want to be a part of. It might seem like fun to get a reaction from folks but you are really just wasting your own time and effort. Equally, if you want to be part of an online community, do not troll. This last is a simple rule but sometimes it seems very hard to follow.

I will also say that while BBF does have its share of trolls, none of them are as bad as many I have discovered on other forums, including forums that I have moderated. Because I understand from this the amount of extra work such a megatroll can cause I also generally have my sympathies with the moderators in such cases regardless of how they handle the situation.

[billw55]

 Zelandakh, on 2014-February-06, 07:14, said:

So having a unique name is no guarantee - and mycroft strikes me as much more likely to be copied than Zelandakh!

I think he meant his real life name. I suspect that mycroft is a somewhat frequently used handle, due to its culture reference.

[32519]

Helene_t: Define here in bullet form, point by point, your definition of a troll.

[PhilKing]

 32519, on 2014-February-06, 10:00, said:

Helene_t: Define here in bullet form, point by point, your definition of a troll.

3. Makes provocative statements of the absurd.

2. Has running arguments with multiple posters.

5. Tracks the above down to the Water Cooler.

1. Repeats themself ad nauseum yet never listens to the replies.

9. Asks what is a troll.

[jjbrr]

 32519, on 2014-February-06, 10:00, said:

Helene_t: Define here in bullet form, point by point, your definition of a troll.

[mycroft]

Zel: Yes, I meant my RL name. As I say in my profile, if you want it I'll give it to you. If you work it out (and it isn't hard), I don't care. Please don't make the connection explicit, though.

It's not designed to stop the NSA, nor the ACBL, nor a lawyer. It's designed to stop interview-googling and provide a one-layer safety net.

Also, I think some of the reasons that That Other Site has more and more experts on it are:
- They are all experts and are targeting experts (with the "you can enter the big events online" thing, et al)
- Their business is creating a BW-level forum (where BBO's business is creating a BBO community), so they're going to spend more money and time protecting the BW-writer-class players from trollish behaviour, as opposed to here where some of the trolling and reactions thereto are part of the community (until it get abusive)
- New Stuff is New, especially when it's being worked on as a primary goal, rather than a secondary one.

Having said that, mynameisme.org vs "real names inhibit trolling" vs. "G+ profiles tied to YouTube Comments lead to real names, ASCII d**k art"...

[dustinst22]

I don't look at "The Other Site" as competition or an alternative to this forum. The two are very much different in the way content is generated and the way the members participate and interact.

BBO is a message forum where it's much easier/quicker to generate new content, whereas the other site is focused primarily on high quality articles/video content and bidding problems/polls. Both have their use and really shouldn't cannibalize or compete with each other.

Removing the upvote isn't going to increase membership or reduce the number of trolls. I think the trolling problem here is grossly exaggerated. The BBO forum is by and large a very civil place if compared to any other forum on the Internet. Trolls gonna Troll. At least we have relatively few of them.

[barmar]

 dustinst22, on 2014-February-07, 12:03, said:

The BBO forum is by and large a very civil place if compared to any other forum on the Internet. Trolls gonna Troll. At least we have relatively few of them.

Yeah, if you want to see real trolling, take a look at Usenet. Many posters there have raised it to an art form.

[mycroft]

yes, but on usenet you have killfiles. Lovely, Lovely Killfiles. And threading.

But oh well.

[barmar]

Yeah, but on Usenet you also have nym-shifting, which makes it hard to killfile.