There is genuine knowledge in the forum pages though, and if you're doing stuff for DOS/real-mode x86 there's a good chance you'll find yourself there.
https://www.vogons.org/search.php?st=0&sk=t&sd=d&sr=posts&ke...
looks spicy but almost a year old, maybe the guy continued to harass.
I've seen rough people everywhere on the internet, but that's at least very delighting.
This sounds like one of those situations where if you just warned and then banned certain people, the community would be much better off.
I don’t know what to do about how toxicity has become so normalised in online spaces that people don’t even bother to flag it. I don’t know how many times I’ve had to tell new members that VOGONS is not Reddit or Twitter and to not import antisocial behaviour from those places into this place. It is like fighting a losing battle with an invasive species.
Frankly, I also don’t know how to strike the right balance when it comes to long-time members who break the rules infrequently but consistently. Knowing that a forum regular is probably going to break the rules again in the future, but not for several months, doesn’t make for an obvious solution to me. So I try to do the best I can to remind people to do better, and hope the time-until-relapse goes up. But I am sure this negatively impacts other community members since they will see the same person doing the same thing again and wonder why nothing is being done about them, not noticing that the last incident was three or six or twelve months ago.
And again, for actual crime, it's not the forum moderators at all who should lead some actions. That would really be problematic.
Suspend them for a month the first time, ban them outright the second. Sounds like they're not interested in listening to reason. Also pour encourager les autres, etc.
The fundamental attribution error makes us believe the problem must be that this kind of person is “not interested in listening to reason”, but I can tell you that the ones who aren’t interested in listening make that abundantly clear when you ask them to stop. They are not the ones I struggle with. The problem cases are those who act in good faith but have trouble regulating their emotions, infrequently enough to not be an obvious menace, but consistently enough that I recognise their names.
Sure but they also give consistency, avoid the sheen of "you can behave badly if you do it infrequently", and avoid the kind of loophole lawyering you often get when rules aren't consistently and stringently applied.
> usually end up backfiring catastrophically at some point.
Having been in many forums where bad behaviour[0] was not rooted out at source immediately and forcefully, I can say from my experience that also ends up badly. Perhaps not for the people in charge and their favoured brethren, I'll grant you.
[0] Including my own on occasion, I am ashamed to say with hindsight.
The angst comes from the grey area between “do nothing” and “ban forever”. How does one strike a balance between the health of the overall community against the need of the individual to be able to take risks and make mistakes? A simple binary doesn’t cut it.
E.g. I got banned from Stack Overflow for deleting my own comments in protest of their new policies, which is explicitly allowed by the rules, but hinders their new project of selling site dumps to AI companies, therefore it merits punishment, regardless of what the rules say. And it's not unique to SO - every community is like this - so we should probably acknowledge it.
You find a new moderator who won't stand for it. They start escalating moderation action, and the wider moderation team follows their example
If you're at the point where your community is so toxic that you can't find a moderator... you need a ban wave. Good luck
An army of dictatorial tone-policing moderators won’t create a safe space free from abuse, just a different kind of toxic space. So it is a very hard problem, not solvable by just kicking out a couple of bad apples. We are all swimming in a sea that causes the apples to rot.