Ask Slashdot: How Do You Deal With Aggressive Forum Users?

Slashdot reader dryriver writes: I've noticed a disturbing trend while trying to resolve a rather tricky tech issue by asking questions on a number of internet forums. The number of people who don't help at all with problems but rather butt into threads with unhelpful comments like "Why would you want to do that in the first place?" or "why don't you look at X poorly written documentation page " was staggering. One forum user with 1,500+ posts even posted "you are such a n00b if you can't figure this out" in my question thread, even though my tech question wasn't one that is obvious or easy to resolve...

I seem to remember a time when people helped each other far more readily on the internet. Now there seems to be a new breed of forum user who a) hangs out at a forum socially all day b) does not bother to help at all and c) gets a kick out of telling you things like "what a stupid question" or "nobody will help you with that here" or similar... Where have the good old days gone when people much more readily gave other people step-by-step tips, tricks, instructions and advice?
The original submission claims the ratio of unhelpful comments to helpful ones was 5 to 1. Has anyone else experienced this? And if so, what's the best response? Leave your best answers in the comments. How do you deal with aggressive forum users?

Comments

Wade through...

[mhkohne]

Honestly, if there's a stack exchange site (for instance, stackoverflow.com for programming questions) for it, I ask there - the Q&A focused design is far from perfect, but the 'attitude' answers don't last long, and are removed pretty quickly.

It's got other problems of course, but for this particular problem, the Stack Exchange model works pretty well at keeping the stupid and useless answers to a lower level than other sites.

Beyond that, you've got to search out communities that aren't full of jerks and a-holes. Sadly, there's at least one in every crowd, but some communities are better at ejecting bad actors than others.

Nothing New

[StormReaver]

It's been like that since the Internet went mainstream in the 1990's, and even when the Internet was opened up to Universities before going mainstream. The overall proportion of useless forum idiots has probably stayed relatively constant for the last 20+ years (and probably even before Web forums overtook Usenet).

The problem probably seems worse now because the Internet population is much larger than it was back then, making the absolute numbers larger; but the ratio of idiots to the entire population is probably in the same ballpark as back then.

The answer has always been the same: you must ignore them, and don't feed the trolls. At least on Usenet, we had the twit filter that would allow us to list the people we wanted to automatically ignore.

Edit, Delete, Tmp-ban, Remove

[SuperKendall]

One forum I have helped moderate had a number of moderator tools:

1) You could edit any post. Often some flamebait line comes as a single line at the end of an otherwise reasonable post. You can just edit out the flame and send them a message explaining that they should be more respectful of other forum members.

2) You could delete a message. Some messages were just pure troll or flame, again you can just delete them and explain to them why it was removed. Then they can argue with privately instead of in the forum where it annoys everyone.

3) Temp ban. We also had the option to ban a user for a few days. That was great because someone who just was really hot and kept posting sometimes would be perfectly fine with a few days to cool off. Lots of people know when they are unreasonable and are fine after some correction, then they are productive forum members.

4) Remove. Sometimes people are just so grating, that really there is no option for the well-being of others other than to remove them. Sure they can register under other usernames and come back, but often these people have such distinctive writing styles that a moderator can recognize them right away and just ban new users with a similar stye or message.

In general I would say, as a moderator you should give more leeway to people who have been on a forum for a while, but brook no nonsense with new members or repeat violators. Moderation is inherently a grey area anyway, so every action is a judgement call... it's best if you can have a few moderators so they can discuss options amongst them and come to a reasonable solution.