Suggestion: enforce the rule against trolling/baiting

KFCeytron·Apr 18, 2019·3 votes·2,527 views

There is technically a rule against it ("Posting designed to bait conversation or falsify content." in Universal Rules), but it's rarely enforced. I've only seen it enforced once, when someone was making multiple posts per day designed to rile up everyone on Boards. I spent several hours explaining this to Boards mods before they finally conceded my point and banned that user. C.f. more minor cases that involve annoying a single person in a single thread for the purpose of inciting an argument. These are given a clear and confirmed pass by the mod team. If such posts were moderated and shut down promptly when reported, not only would the person being targeted and baited into an argument have a more enjoyable experience, they would avoid posting something out of sheer irritation that mods would then feel the need to deal with. It's a win-win. This would be especially useful because the mods are not a monolith: mods frequently disagree with decisions made by other mods, which creates inconsistency and mixed messages for us users. I guess that makes it a win-win-win, really.

Thanks for listening. :) 👋

8 Comments

KalikainApr 18, 20192 votes

How do you determine if someone is posting bait to bait, and they actually dont believe what theyre saying/dont know how it come across.

English is the hardest language and its hard to determine intent by just words.

KFCeytronApr 18, 20191 votes

{quoted}

How do you determine if someone is posting bait to bait, and they actually dont believe what theyre saying/dont know how it come across.

English is the hardest language and its hard to determine intent by just words.

Couldn't you say that about any post? The key is that in many cases it's not impossible to determine intent.

Imperial PandaaApr 20, 2019

I think a possible example of a bait thread is this "You banned most played Mundo player" thread in PB.

Not sure if saying who the OP of the thread is considered Name and Shame; time to find out. It is posted by Angry Korean Man.

KFCeytronApr 20, 20191 votes

[{quoted}](name=Imperial Pandaa,realm=NA,application-id=6heBIhQc,discussion-id=1Fg0W1tK,comment-id=00000001,timestamp=2019-04-20T01:03:15.224+0000)

I think a possible example of a bait thread is this "You banned most played Mundo player" thread in PB.

Not sure if saying who the OP of the thread is considered Name and Shame; time to find out. It is posted by Angry Korean Man.

Apparently that thread is fine because its title doesn't contain any misspelled words, which is how mods determine whether someone is trolling.

ChickenWrapApr 19, 20191 votes

... Is this a bait thread?

KFCeytronApr 19, 20191 votes

{quoted}

... Is this a bait thread?

No.

Shouldn't you, as a mod, have the expertise to tell the difference?

ChickenWrapApr 19, 20191 votes

{quoted}

No.

Shouldn't you, as a mod, have the expertise to tell the difference?

I, as a mod, have the expertise to tell you that the mods are a volunteer group that can't always get to things on time. We do care about situations like that and we deal with them accordingly. Not every mod has the same idea of what baiting or trolling might be, however, which can lead to sometimes seeing things that might appear that way to one person that aren't to another. I can speak with certainty that I, as well as others, have and do remove threads and posts like this all the time. Admittedly, I'm not sure what happened in that discord chat you had, but the best way to go about making sure we can punish something like that is to tell them to stop. Once your intention has been made clear, if they continue to play that game with you, it's a lot easier to hit them for it. It's not always 100% black and white with player interactions between each other though.

When someone comes into a thread with the clear intention of inciting problems though, that gets hit too. Maybe not immediately, because we have so many reports to sift through and, again, volunteer team, but if you bring it to our attention in the Discord if you think it's bad enough that it needs to be handled ASAP, we can do that for you too.

KFCeytronApr 19, 20191 votes

{quoted}

I, as a mod, have the expertise to tell you that the mods are a volunteer group that can't always get to things on time. We do care about situations like that and we deal with them accordingly. Not every mod has the same idea of what baiting or trolling might be, however, which can lead to sometimes seeing things that might appear that way to one person that aren't to another. I can speak with certainty that I, as well as others, have and do remove threads and posts like this all the time. Admittedly, I'm not sure what happened in that discord chat you had, but the best way to go about making sure we can punish something like that is to tell them to stop. Once your intention has been made clear, if they continue to play that game with you, it's a lot easier to hit them for it. It's not always 100% black and white with player interactions between each other though.

When someone comes into a thread with the clear intention of inciting problems though, that gets hit too. Maybe not immediately, because we have so many reports to sift through and, again, volunteer team, but if you bring it to our attention in the Discord if you think it's bad enough that it needs to be handled ASAP, we can do that for you too.

So, I should be telling the person to cut it out? Like, for example, "stop pestering me"? That's the advice you're giving me?

You might want to run that by the rest of the mod team, because this is one of those instances of mixed messages I referred to.