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

Ignore them

[Jeremi]

Nothing requires you to do anything about them; just treat them as meaningless noise, and act the same as you would have acted if their unhelpful post did not exist.

Re:Ignore them

[Cheech Wizard]

You are right. I have run a tech forum since about 1996 - Well, I actually started the forum part in about 1998. The first thing to understand is that over time things have changed. In the "early days" computers were not anywhere near as ubiquitous as today so most of the visitors were, while not techies as in this forum, but in their field of expertise. There were some problems, too. There were some people who would have 3 or 4 accounts and would literally start a discussion thread and then another of their "personalities" would post, and then a third one which would start a fight of sorts and get nasty. It took a few years but finally we got some code which, when an admin "marked" an account, that person could post (people did and still do have to register and be logged in to post) but the post would be invisible to everyone except that user. It didn't take too long - Maybe a year or so - Where we had things totally under control. People who were abusing the forum eventually got tired of trying to disrupt things. And the forum was/is small enough (well, these days with Facebook, Linkedin and such taking over people's interest is is) that control isn't an issue. And - We do have a lot of very long term moderators so someone is online most of the time. One thing I have noticed is that since the election of the orange one there are some forums I have stopped visiting. I'm typically a lurker (as I am here - Rarely log in but do visit every day as I have for years) but even some very good discussion groups are becoming pretty stupid. Trump this, dems that, typically where politics shouldn't be a part. I'm finding ore and more free time as I back away from visiting old haunts. Then again I'm almost 70 so all of this is old hat, so to speak, for me. I do miss what I call the "good old days". Even the vulgarity in the first posts of this discussion turned me off. I have seen this problem so I did log in to comment, but the vulgarity alone is telling me to keep to the headlines and to not bother to read the comments (much less log in to help people).

Re:Ignore them

[Mister Transistor]

VBulletin, very popular forum software, has a feature called "Global ignore" that does what you describe. I used to run a large well-moderated professional discussion forum and if we got a jerk in the rolls we would first warn him, then either put him on global ignore or "miserable users", which is hilarious. It would take people sometimes months to realize they were being muted, sometimes they never did figure it out.

Miserable users was pretty funny, if you decided the person had to go but was big enough of an asshole you wanted to still have some fun, you would turn this on. It would:

1. Slow response (time delay) on every page (20 to 60 seconds default).
2. A chance they will get the "server busy" message (50% by default).
3. A chance that no search facilities will be available (75% by default).
4. A chance they will get redirected to another preset page (25% & homepage by default).
5. A chance they will simply get a blank page (25% by default).
6. Post flood limit increased by a defined factor (10 times by default).
7. If they get past all this okay, then they will be served up their proper page.

After that you just waited for them to get frustrated and leave of their own accord. Passive-Aggressive Nirvana!

Second that

[Okian Warrior]

You're asking HERE?

I'll second that.

It might be because nice people tend to lose patience and go away, so that the forums have nothing but griefers left.

Lots of forums are completely toxic in this regard, and Slashdot has fallen prey to this as well. Post a non-insulting position about something that doesn't jibe with the group-think and you'll get nothing but insults. No thought put into it, almost a boiler-plate "you're really stupid" or "you're a racist".

Try to contribute to Slashdot by submitting articles, and the toxic users will mod them as spam and get your account locked.

They seem to think that any tactic in support of their end goals is OK, and they don't see the value of well-formed alternate opinions, and reasoned discourse. All they see is that opposition seems to be less over time.

They view it as "winning" when reasonable people lose patience with the griefers and leave.

What's left is the toxic residue.

Re:Second that

[arth1]

I see problems coming from both ends. The people asking are just as bad, really.
Some leave out important details like which programming language(s) or OS.
Some post at an expert forum, and get upset if they get expert answers when what they wanted was unskilled user level answers and not how to run a core backtrace to narrow down a root cause.
Some ask others to do a several hour jobs for them for free. (I'd mention a common factor for these type of questions if it weren't racist to do so.)
Then there are the hit-and-run posters, asking a question, and never coming back to look at the answers or thank anyone who answered.

But yeah, people who answer can be frustrating too. The most irritating to me are what I call Microsoft answers, which are cut and paste answers from articles, and while 100% correct are 100% unhelpful because they either apply to something different, or just define the problem without giving an answer.
Almost as irritating are what I call tech support answers, where the person asking have given low level details and wants to understand, and some nincompoop says that he should reinstall or unplug and plug back in..
Then there's the "works for me" crowd.
And those who want to argue about why you do something. If someone starts with "in a mc68k environment with 256 kB RAM", chances are that he won't have a choice, so arguing that he should use a raspberry pi or cluster of octacore xeons instead is just derailing.
And those who demand full logs and configuration files for questions where that informaton obviously won't provide any useful information. Questions about how to obtain an old version don't need full logs and config files. Really. Nor questions that contain enough details that the answer is obvious, or where a repeatable minimal test case has been provided.

It goes both ways.

Re:Second that

[ShanghaiBill]

And it's true, people have gotten ruder over the years.

You have obviously never seen a USENET flamewar from 35 years ago. I have seen no evidence that people are any ruder today.

Re:Second that

[Anonymous Coward]

We're all just simply discovering human nature for what it is.

Once upon a time you HAD to work in a community to survive. Like being accepted in a village in medieval times. Excuse the over simplification but you could probably ask your neighbour for help if you didn't have any bread or they would share their apples if you shared your cheese and that built communities.

These days you can make it as an individual because your rights and default entitlements by paying taxes have most replaced the need for a community. You can go to a food bank, you can claim welfare, ask for loans etc. These things do not depend on a community or a small group of people per se they are just services.

Here's a basic question, why do I need you? why do you need me? I could die tomorrow and you'd never know, that's how important I am in your life. This basic reality also drives behaviour.

If without me you knew you'd have trouble securing shelter for your goats in winter then it would be a major blow to your survival if I died but today? -today there are far too many people that are just dead weight really but I digress.

What happens online is almost a direct channel of people's thoughts. There is no body language or polite in-person behaviour. Imagine what would happen if people's thoughts were exchanged directly. The content could be far far worse.

That last point ties up nicely with my start. Human nature. While some of us aspire to do better and some in fact do, we humans are still mostly savages.

Re:Non-answers

[Sebby]

.... but, what I would do is just ignore, as others have already stated.

If I ran a list/forum, I would specifically state in the Terms that 'newbie' questions should be expected, and any condescending responses would result in immediate suspension. If users don't have anything helpful to respond with, they shouldn't bother responding.

Re:Non-answers

[shri]

I wish I could mod you up. :)

The problem is the people who own the site(s) and not the users. Treat your site like your living room - do not tolerate people who piss on your living room floor. Bounce them out, clean up and apologise to your other guests.

Re:Leave the forum

[somenickname]

"If you meet an asshole in the morning, you met an asshole. If you meet assholes all day, maybe you're the asshole".

Re:FIRST POST!

[Anonymous Coward]

Aggressive forum users are a sign of the failure of the moderators. You'll see that on commenting systems where there is peer moderation (like on slashdot) or very relaxed, almost non existent moderation such as youtube aggressive forum users are never really a problem. On youtube where moderation is non existent, users know not to make aggressive, provoking posts because they know that the reply they get back will be 2x as aggressive and nothing will be held back, plus the aggressive forum will be rediculed by the rest of the forum commenters discouraging them from a repeat offence.
On a forum where there is active moderation but the moderator takes a favorable/ignorant stance on aggressive users, this leads to a really bad culture on the board because nothing is really done about the said aggressive forum user and it just kills serious threads and drives legitimate commenters off. Once the aggressive user knows he can get away with belittling and being rude to others he continues it in other threads because he knows the moderators will do little if anything about it.

Unfortunately there is nothing you can really do about aggressive users like that because it is moderators failing to do their job/doing a half assed effort at it and if you complain they will take action on you instead of on the perpetrator. In some ways I think some moderators even LIKE having aggressive users around because they lighten the load on the moderators by killing off discussions and driving off people so there is less for them to moderate/reply to in threads.

Examples of failing forums:
IMDB forums. I am not surprised the IMDB forums are shutting down. IMDB is owned by Amazon and their forums are a disgrace, filled with trolls and the moderators do a extremely poor job about it.

The Steam "Help and Tips", and "Suggestion/Ideas" forums. Just like the OP describes, when people ask for genuine help they get shitposts. When they make a suggestion they get replies to the line of "Why would you want to do that in the first place" or the vanilla response that the suggested idea will only help griefers/phishers/spammers, ignoringthe fact that they are acting like griefers themselves with their responses. It's like the MPAA trying to curb copyright infringement by using the keywords like "funding terrorism". They can't just reply to someone civily, they have to be insultive and negative to the person they are replying to. It is this sort of negativity that ruins discussions by serial discussion killers such as Start_running http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198043285599, Satoru http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970218004 and Zetikla http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198001062896

In the Doom board someone asked for a Linux port and the windows trolls swooped in:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/379720/discussions/0/357286119106149442/ . The moderators did nothing about it.

I know that this post now is going to attract all sorts of trolls but the posts I'm talking about people write genuine lengthy on topic posts that have nothing to do with other users and they get attacked/griefed for it. That is what I am talking about that drives forum contributers off and stonewalls discussions.It is a big problem on discussion boards where the moderators are poor at doing their job. If they can;t moderate then they should let the users as a whole do it for them like on slashdot.

Re:FIRST POST!

[kaur]

Go to a forum dealing with, say, gardening or pets or childcare and you'll very rarely see this sort of thing, the standard response there is sympathy and advice.

I disagree.

I frequent a large parenting forum.
The bitterness and disdain for others I see there is unseen in the "techie" world. Newbie questions get not only mocked, but attacked on personal level and with psychological finesse that only comes with practice. The responders know that new parents are uncertain in their parenting skills and they attack this condition with precision. "What kind of parent could ask a question like this?" "MY child does ALWAYS obey the rules we have set. What mistakes must you have done for your kids to not obey yours?" etc etc.

The people on the parenting forum seem like Putin's trolls in training for me. They practice psychological forum-warfare, trying to identify the weak spots in other participants. People who come for advice in parenting MUST have the weak spots (otherwise they would not seek help in the first place) and thus provide a good training ground.

Thus this behaviour is universal to the 'net, not limited to "techie forums".

Re:FIRST POST!

[serviscope_minor]

The specific behaviour the OP describes is more a sign of the type of forum they're participating in, it's, unfortunately, fairly common behaviour among geek/techie personalities. Go to a forum dealing with, say, gardening or pets or childcare and you'll very rarely see this sort of thing, the standard response there is sympathy and advice.

Yes and no. I have sympathy with both sides and I'm about to write an ill structured post, blathering my thoughts all over the place. With that out of the way...

Thing is, on those gardening forums, you're generally asking for free help from people who are world experts, very busy (the forum covers work too) and can command $2000 a day consulting fees. Tahe for example, Theo De Raadt. He is one hellofa smart guy and leads an absolutely world class operating system (one which incidentally seems to be plagued with freeloaders---how many megacorps rely on openssh and contribute basically nothing) on remarkably small funds. The forums/mailing lists aren't a social gathering, they're very much work, but work that happens to be visible and in theory accessible to all.

In a very real sense, butting into those forums, interrupting busy professionals doing work and asking for unpaid help when you can't be bothered to do the research is the height of rudeness. Someone telling you to "fuck off" is less rude. I have actually had the pleasure of conversing with Mr De Raadt on the mailing list. I was doing a "you probably shouldn't be doing this" kind of thing, but I probably spent 4 extra hours researching after deciding to write a post, reading the man pages, browsing the source and forum posts, to make sure I wasn't taking the piss. I actually learned a bunch more doing that and so was able to go in at a deeper level.

Theo himself weighed in on the thread after a few posts. He was polite, and helpful and it was an overall excellent experience. But I didn't ask a very busy, very overworked person to stop work and help me for free so I don't have to think myself.

On the other hand...

I don't tend to respond like that (yet?). I can command reasonable consulting fees in my area and I get massively n00bish questions from people trying to use my C++ library which makes it clear they're only passingly familiar with a C++ compiler and can't even answer basic questions like "what compiler are you using". But I'm not famous and my code isn't anything like as popular as OpenBSD, so while those are a relatively high proportion of questions, they are reasonably rare.

I am getting slightly annoyed by them though. I imagine if it was daily (or more) then my patience would have worn very thin by now.

But it goes all the way down. N00b questions on a n00b forum are fine. Actually n00b questions on any forum are fine, provided the n00b in question (and we are all n00bs) are not entitled. But after a couple of years of answering question from people who want a quick fix or their homework solved, I think people get really, really jaded and worn. At that point they tend to see bad behaviour even when there is none. For example, misunderstanding a question, then attacking based on that BECAUSE IT LOOKS LIKE ANOTHER FUCKING HOMEWORK QUESTION JUST FUCK OFF!!11!1one etc.

But they, don't want to leave the forum because there are also the good tech bits.

Oh and of course some people are simply raging assholes who believe that unpleasantness is a substitute for quality (or hides a lack of it), or just like to shit on others to make themselves feel good. The trouble is the aggressiveness from the competent, but deeply jaded people allows the assholeishness from the incompetent to flourish.

But bear in mind that it is assholey to ask a world expert for help when 10 minutes of googling would have solved the problem. Also bear in mind that we all have days where somehow we miss blindingly obvious answers.

Basically there are assholes on both sides, and there's a lot of jadedness.

I have no idea what the solution is.