SWST Trolling

[Mr. Oragahn]

While I do agree SWST is a Troll, and not just a stubborn poster, I believe people could simply ignore him without it affecting our ability to debate in an intelligent manner...
Mr. O said it would be too long to scroll past his posts...
Bullshit...
As soon as you see his name on the post, scroll down and go to the next poster...
It's what I mostly do, except for the odd comment on some gems of his...

And if he posts bad and miserable messages, just for the sake of it, even if no one replies? If he keeps baiting people, while looking like he's being honest, notably with fresh (reboot) threads? If you load a page from the last post (instead of from the top and scrolling down) and don't pay enough attention (yeah because you have to pay attention not to cross the path of the troll, I admire the shift of burden here, really, you have to avoid the troll, act like if he's not there) and start reading one's post and wanted to react, only to realize that one was replying to a troll? And what if there are more trolls, which you should ignore, of course, and they happen to saturate the forum with silly threads (which you have to ignore) and pollute threads with several posts (which you must scroll over, in order to find the one post from someone who is a good debater or still cares about posting in threads or even a forum gone down the drain because of such leniency)?

That's just not working, it's bollocks.

[sonofccn]

@JMS

I'm sorry to hear this sir. I do hope you change your mind but regardless I consider it an honor to have been part of your "experiment". I don't believe it was a failure. Anyway thanks for everything you did.

[Praeothmin]

You think that I'm impressed by mods resigning at the slightest sign of the local admin overturning one or two of their decisions, and preferring to feign ignoring a troll when they actually couldn't even help but engage said troll for another round of pointless arguing?

I don't really care whether you are impressed with me or not, and as I said, I mostly ignore him, but I did come back for another round, hoping he'd changed a bit, but when I saw he didn't, and no longer had any fun replying to his posts, I stopped...

I didn't start crying on about how long and tedious and tough it is to simply scroll over his posts, though...

You're the one saying to offended members that they should ignore him, and yet even you couldn't refrain from replying to his posts. You just can't, because you're here to debate, you like it.

And when I find the person I'm debating too obtuse for my tastes, I ignore the person for as long as I want...
And I don't mind taking those precious few seconds of my time to scroll over offending posts...
And so throwing ultimatums is childish to me, and will always be...

Oh, and the warnings that were overturned?
I did document them, as you could clearly see in the last thread where I warned him, and still I was told it wasn't enough...
So to me, this means I'm not the man for the job, as I feel I can't do anything productive...

[Mike DiCenso]

@JMS

I'm sorry to hear this sir. I do hope you change your mind but regardless I consider it an honor to have been part of your "experiment". I don't believe it was a failure. Anyway thanks for everything you did.

I agree. I think, like many human endeavors that this board has gone through rough spots, but over all I think it's a success. Most particularly in the area of documenting and archiving information relating to the true technological capabilities of Star Wars and Star Trek.
-Mike

[Mike DiCenso]

Currently, a troll invasion would make this board collapse.
The greatest lesson isn't for SWST to learn, but for mods and JMS.

There is still no sign of permaban despite most of us wishing for SWST to be dealt with once and for all.
Surely it's not a democracy, but it's not a gulag either. People can leave at any time.
We've already lost l33telboi and Mith, WILGA* as well, plus that other bloke from SDN. And others.

No, I don't think so, not entirely. A single, troll feigning politeness , like SWST, is what would cause problems, because at first you can't tell if you are dealing with someone who just doesn't know any better.

But if we had suffered a classic troll invasion, like what SDN used to do way back in the day with TrekBBS, the first ST-v-SW.Net board that RSA ran, and STrek-v-SWars.Net's board, it would be obvious and it would be dealt with as quickly and easily as KSW and his merry band of sockpuppets were. Only it go full permaban mode.

Would it be a massive disruption? You betcha. But that's I think the trial by fire that this board really missed out on that might have put it on the map. What made ST-v-SW.Net and especially STrek-v-SWars.Net's board work is that after those board invasions, a number of the invaders from SDN stayed behind and actually legitimately took part in the debates there and actually dare I say, enjoyed themselves once they saw that they could really, truly debate Star Trek versus Star Wars again without having to worry about Wong or ICS.

Sadly, because of the failure of the three non-SDN/SBC boards before this one, the momentum was largely lost for that sort of thing and people just settled into a state of apathy, and there was no expectation back then in 2006 when this board started that it would go the distance. Which is a shame as once TCW started three years ago, it would have shifted the debate back the other direction, and indeed it has as witnessed by the huge impact the series has had on SBC and the Holy Sanctity of AOTC: ICS there. Yeah sure there was efforts like your own there that got people realizing that the movies didn't support Saxtonian ICS numbers, but what people really needed to convince themselves was a big In-Your-Face thing, like TCW that was above the EU that Warsies kept falling back on over and over, but was directly approved and worked on by George Lucas himself. Thus they could not seriously question it.

I think in part that's why Kane departed. You can see here during RSA's "TCW CGI show and The State of the Debate" that he began to acknowledge in a round about sort of way what a serious game changer the CGI series was and what a live-action series would mean, if that ever got into production.

If you were him, why would you want to stay and have that pounded over your head? It's worse for a Warsie than ICS is for a Trekkie.

In short, the real problem for this board is that it is slightly out of phase with the ideal timeframe to grab up as many members from both sides and hold onto them as loyal members, and quietly on the side people have agreed that ICS was a bunch of BS. What we have done here at SFJN is just steadfastly document the material that shows what a Big Lie the foundations of the Saxtonian-authored ICS really were with the Base Delta Zero and "List of expanded universe sources incompatible with ICS" threads.
-Mike

[Picard]

And question is, how many people even read that documentation, and how many will read it if board falls apart, since rankings of forums on search engines are also partly determined by amount of traffic they get.

I think that another problem is that both Star Wars and Star Trek are old franchises. Even at SDN or SBC, Trek/Wars debate posts do not constitute majority of traffic; and this board is more Trek/Wars oriented than either of aforemented forums, as someone has already pointed out.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Mike, there's quite one big problem with your last post, in that KSW was not a clever troll at all, and I wasn't thinking of him. KSW was easy to manage: his style was virulent, he insulted people a lot and was nowhere subtle when it come to sock puppetery. He was a piece of cake. What I'm speaking of is a different kind of troll, the SWST one, the one that makes you pull your scalp off. The idea was to imagine if you had to deal with two of him.
You know, clever ones, just there to take the piss and have a good laugh behind his screen and/or inside his circle. The invasions you think of are rather crude and silly, and nothing more complicated is attempted on boards where the admin would easily smack down on the guys who is puzzling the staff about his real motives and manages to annoy everybody to unfathomable amounts.

Anyway, I'm in disagreement with JMS regarding SWST and that he is enforcing sanctions to a level he doesn't feel is right, essentially making him forced to uphold some code which he thinks has been misunderstood. I see that SWST has been banned for 4 months. I'm obviously not enjoying this mixed decision. A disappointing one.
Considering that it's not my board and that I simply can force my ways through, I'll take some time off. I know that I shared this opinion with other members and that other disagreed, but I also can't stand a forum where obvious trolls aren't dealt with fiercely when it's due, and don't want to hear members being told that they just have to ignore the troll. Why not just fucking ban him once and for all, instead of asking for ridiculous things, that's just beyond me. SWST is, in my opinion, a total contradiction regarding this board's goal, as he contributes nothing good, yet what is expected from us is that we come to a forum, this forum, and learn not to read posts (very funny), instead of TPTB doing the quickest, simplest and most obvious thing to do. This is just too crazy.

[Admiral Breetai]

I've spent some time thinking about this, and some time asking myself the question:

Would any persistently pro-SW poster be able to come here and not have a crowd clamoring to ban them? I think the answer, at this point, is no; and I'm not fond of this idea. I feel as if most of the complaints about SWST are rooted in the fact that he is outnumbered and stubborn.

I also feel as if I am nearly alone in this. To judge from what I have seen in this thread, nearly the entire community seems lined up behind wanting to see SWST to go regardless of what justifications are used.

So I'm done. The experiment has failed. I do not wish to destroy the community; I will still host the website, update the board software, periodically delete spambots, and other necessary administrative tasks that the moderators cannot do, but I'm done trying to enforce a code that the community has stopped believing in. I am therefore walking away from my position as a court of last appeal and away from the helm of this ship.

Mike, since Praeothmin has chosen to resign, this leaves it your ball game for the moment while whatever policy modifications are being made. The Security Officer group has - or should have - full permissions to the Rules forum section. I will add or remove users from that group on request as seems legitimate. I can be contacted via PM or e-mail, but am not likely to be reading posts in this or the other forum sections.

I think you just went and completely overreacted to the other extreme in a spectacular fashion and to take it to a step further insulted allot of your members by accusing them of being intolerant populists in the process

this is very unfair and hardly an accurate depiction of the current setting

[Mr. Oragahn]

http://www.starfleetjedi.net/forum/view ... 640#p39640

To Mike;

I'm disappointed, once again, that SWST has returned, not to face any of the arguments I provided in the BDZ thread, but only to focus on irrelevant points.
Above all things, his latest post is of a lower quality than ever, not because his arguments are terrible -that we know- but because his trolling is even less veiled.

Now he's trying to bait me on the reasons why I got banned from spacebattles.com.
I haven't reported all the other crap he had posted before, like the numerous other arguments and facts he again ignored (which forced me to post links, again), because it doesn't even get him banned.

But shouldn't this obvious and completely irrelevant trolling be enough?
His plea of innocence is getting tiring.

He has the gall to bump the thread only to stir trouble, the same claims of martyrdom he's been throwing at the website's community and staff since day one.