Take a glance at GD. People aren’t looking for “actual discussions”, every other thread (or more) is a soap box.
Quite the opposite, trolls spam flags on people they disagree with. Enough flags leads to corrective action (happened to my partner, luckily she got her ban overturned). This doesn’t exactly facilitate discussion.
Are the forums not a toxic mess to you in their current state? Why is me being able to mute people toxic to you. Conversation is great and all, but facilitating is not synonymous with enforcing.
The problem being, the sheltered techies who coded this software don’t really get how the internet works, so rather than provide useful tools for excising the bad actors that exist, they included automatic lock systems that shut threads down for 24 hrs/until they get reviewed and ok’ed. Which then becomes a way to shut down threads by going in and bothering enough people to get the thread shut down.
They also said they ‘fixed’ people without an active subscription posting in General Discussion but I posted for weeks without an active subscription earlier this month. >_>
Also, @OP: Make sure you do not flag posts simply because you do not agree with them. They’ve stated before that if you abuse the flagging feature, they will keep track and if you do it too much, you will lose the ability to flag and potentially other actions.
There is a difference between trolling and not agreeing with you, just remember that.
That in and of itself is a bannable offense. Unfortunately auto-moderation is a thing and mistakes can happen even when a person is involved, but the reason your partner was able to get her ban overturned is because they can tell when all those flags come from a single or a linked account. The person who did that likely received a stiff penalty after your partner filed her report.
Toxicity to a certain extent is always going to be present. The question is; “what is best for the facilitation of discourse?”
Think of it like the dungeon deserter debuff. Is it unfair to certain individuals in a select handful of circumstances? Absolutely. But is it better than the alternative, where players in a group of 1-2 people can hold the rest of the group hostage? Also true.
The lack of a block feature means you have to see trollish behavior, but it’s on you whether or not to engage with it. Personal accountability isn’t a bad thing. At the same time, people can’t just ignore differing positions they don’t like on issues they’re passionate about. They have to deal with the fact that it will always be a part of their thread, no matter how much they want to just eradicate it. And there’s a certain sense of justice in that notion.
This is EXACTLY what I have been doing. But I’d prefer to block them rather then report every one of their posts. Not only are they are troll but the spam the same exact thing said very slightly different over and over again.
Blocking yourself from seeing their posts doesn’t make their posts go away. Flagging true trolling posts will hide the posts, and the poster can end up with a forum suspension.
If you don’t want to read what they have to say, don’t read it.
Someone is disagreeing w/ someone’s point of view. He’s toxic
Someone likes something that someone else doesn’t. He’s toxic
There is definitely some bad name calling here and there and the obvious trolling post to get baits. But I honestly don’t think there is too much toxicity as alot of people say there is. Sometimes you just need to put your bigboi pants and know that someone will disagree w/ your point of view
Or you know some people can be really good at skirting that line where you can intentionally be trolling some people but haven’t yet done anything that would be ban worthy. Ignore is a common tool in forum software for a reason, it’s not some high minded thing to waste the time scrolling past whatever waste of electrons someone has decided to dump on the forums instead of saving yourself the time and possibly annoyance by ignoring the user instead.
I agree that “toxic” is overused, but people often really are ruder than they should be.
For instance:
Could have been written as: “Sometimes you need to accept that someone will always disagree with your point of view.”
Was what you wrote bad? No. But it was needlessly condescending. I do the same. It’s hard to maintain a respectful attitude, especially when others are being… less than respectful.
It’s more of the point of they’re “Disagreeing” aggressively and refuse to agree to disagree, or move on. To the point of it becoming spam/harassment. You don’t have to agree with me on anything. But I’d prefer them not harass me about it. Even with me ignoring them they won’t stop. I don’t know if bliz would consider that abuse of the report feature or not. But as I can’t ignore them it’s the only option I’m given.
Best you can do is ignore them if they are in a thread you are looking at, and if they respond to you in a trolling way, just flag them.
Be careful on that though. They may just be responding to whatever you said, but not actually TROLLING you. Their language in said post will be important. Use that flag wisely.
again point of view. I didn’t see anything wrong with what I wrote and will stand behind it. Would it offend people. Probably. But there was no malice on what I’ve said. Again “sometimes you just need to put your bigboi pants on” The issue is alot of people see malice on what something someone say just because their upbringing is don’t use “x” word.
This is where I’m having a disconnect. If you’re truly ignoring them, what difference does it make if they “don’t stop”? An ignore feature won’t block their comments from anyone’s view but your own. If you’re not looking at or reading them, it’s the same as an ignore feature. I don’t get why you need technology to do something you can do on your own.
See, I was raised to try to not deliberately offend people when possible. It was considered good manners.
Certainly it matters what sort of crowd you’re in. You can say different things among close friends than among strangers. But here we’re all basically strangers, so it’s better to be as polite as possible. (And yes, I screw that up all the time. But I do try to behave. Mostly.)
Not to speak for Benevolence, but things I can see an ignore list being useful for. There’s some posters that create giant walls of text in support of their own persecution complex that are long enough that yes, I’d rather they weren’t there, or were shrunk to a “ignored user X post here” line. Or if someone is just plain spamming post after post so that you end up having to hunt for other people in the mess. It’s a QoL thing.
Why sugar-coat. I’m sorry but that’s the biggest issue w/ society right now. People just too “Onion skin” to take what people say on face value. I’m also brought up in a respectable upbringing.
But I also have a different upbringing to what you probably consider “respectable”.
I miss ignore. Being able to go into a thread and KNOW that the ones who only exist to derail threads or try to get them locked will not have posts showing up killing the flow.