Thread deletion

[cire]

I am curious why the thread in the Lounge titled "This place has gone to shit" (or something very close to that effect) was deleted without admin addressing the issues it brought up. Does the admin intend to keep dodging those issues and just show up once every few months to clean things up? (And thank goodness you finally showed up -- but I think you missed at least one of his 600+ post accounts. Hello, Shadder.)

I ask in a public post because this is an issue that affects the community as a whole and a private response doesn't interest me.

Also uninterested in third party apologist postings. In other words, if your sole contribution to this thread will be "Admin has a life just like you do," don't bother posting.

What I would be interested in is potential solutions (other than "appoint moderators" which has been suggested time and again and which we're all aware of as a possibility) and interaction with the community from the admin.

[NoXzema]

I hate recommending another forum since I've been here since 2009 (I think?), but it's clear the website isn't going to get updated and the community's ability to help direct people with questions is rather limited in that there is no way to flag a post as possibly providing misinformation. In this sense, Stack Overflow is clearly the victor as far as allowing the community to provide a pathway to a good answer, not only for the immediate original poster, but for everyone that happens to come along in the future. Hell, people post Stack Overflow posts in this very forum as an answer to questions.

Part of the reason I joined this forum was to both learn and to help guide those with what I learned. My first post on this forum dates as far back as simply asking how a pointer works. I provided a test case, what I expected, what was happening, and I was provided with answers that clarified my question.

Unfortunately, there are users that choose to forget the part where they learn but still wish to guide those with questions. Outside of flagging those posts, which may or may not be removed, there's naught that can be done about it. Even worse, the offender can just create a new account. A karma system might be alright but even if the community thought it would be the next step, I doubt anyone would care to implement or update the forum with one.

I don't know... I think the reputable users are fun to hang around and occasionally have a serious discussion but there's a lot more bickering and drama than I care for in a forum about logical programming.

TL;DR: Even if there were solutions, they won't be implemented and nobody really cares.

EDIT: http://www.cplusplus.com/forum/windows/196645/

Chirag Senapati provides bologna answers throughout the entire thread with incorrect terminology, he practically spams it with garbage potentially confusing the OP and/or leading him in a completely incorrect direction. It's been up for days now with all of his posts reported. Nobody cares and there's no mechanism to prevent it.

[BHX]

Also uninterested in third party apologist postings. In other words, if your sole contribution to this thread will be "Admin has a life just like you do," don't bother posting.

I put the polite spin on it. It could be that he has the mentality of most sites where the admins are doing it as a project of love, which is "If you don't like how I run the site, you can leave." Also this isn't a safe space, you are going to get answers whether you like them or want them.

I believe you got the title right, in which the OP claimed he wanted a discussion, which it sparked. When he didn't get the answers he wanted he deleted his account. I'm assuming admin deleted it when the OP made it a childish attack by adding "because of users like gentleguy" to the topic title.

There is no need to talk solutions because the solutions are already obvious and are offered by almost every forum software you can run.

Moderators: The problem is that almost every person on this site has shown or flat out said they have complete disdain for one or more users which overshadow ones trustworthiness to moderate fairly.

IP Bans: Ban specific IPs, but there are ways around them to continue making multiple accounts.

Consecutive posts: There needs to be a lock in place like Allegro.cc where if you are the last person to post you are not able to reply until another party replies forcing you to edit your last post.

EDIT: http://www.cplusplus.com/forum/windows/196645/

Chirag Senapati provides bologna answers throughout the entire thread with incorrect terminology, he practically spams it with garbage potentially confusing the OP and/or leading him in a completely incorrect direction. It's been up for days now with all of his posts reported. Nobody cares and there's no mechanism to prevent it.

"Nobody cares" may be an extreme. The issue I have with the link you posted is that we have one mechanism in place to allow us to stop things like that. The mechanism is our ability to reply and point out that Chirag is full of shit and not listen to his advice. Sadly, that links shows two pages of bullshit without a single user calling him on it, instead users are opting to just report and ignore it with the assumption the admin will fix it. Why should we expect an admin or moderator to fix the problem if we don't even exercise our own ability to point out erroneous claims and correct people where they are wrong?

[shadder]

This site is one of the most amazing place to learn not only c++ but much more. Some may say this place has gone shit; but its OUR shit, we won't let anyone else shit over it, we have to take some steps against all the people who are trying to shit over it;

PS: @cire thank you for starting this thread and welcoming me...

[MikeyBoy]

I don't think it's fair to say this place has gotten particularly worse in any significant way. It's just that we have one persistent troll pestering us at the moment, who's so desperately obsessed with disrupting this forum that, as soon as one of his accounts is closed, he starts another (*).

That this has come during the summer, when the level of activity on the forum is lower than normal, just makes it seem more significant than it is.

(*) I can't understand what could make it so important to him to do this, and I suspect that's something only a trained mental health professional could diagnose. I hope at some point he gets enough clarity to seek this kind of help; I'm sure he'd be much happier for it. But that's not really relevant to the discussion.

[helios]

If you raise concerns about how the site is being managed and your posts get summarily deleted with your questions left unanswered, I think that's a fair response.

[helios]

I'm being sympathetic to your position. Is it necessary to correct me on minutiae, and with that tone to boot?

[kevinkjt2000]

StackOverflow's success comes from community moderation and feedback. Having moderators would help significantly provided that they are consistent with the values and goals of this site and listen to the community. I do not believe that moderators can help much by simply deleting erroneous posts made by unknowing users. These users possibly need help just as much as the person they are attempting to help. However if these unknowing users are obviously trolling, moderators deleting the posts and disabling the account is immensely helpful to the community here. Some of the users also tend to neglect the corrections that us more experienced programmers will point out. Moderating people with ears closed to guidance is also necessary in my opinion. These forums are only as good as their contents. If the posts of trolling and misguidance increase, how can we expect to have a helpful forum? I like helping people without them being led astray, and I myself correct any posts that happen to be pointed out as incorrect. Heck, sometimes I even just edit my post to say look at so-and-so's post just because they had a slightly better solution.

[MikeyBoy]

That sucks - sorry to hear that. I guess it's one of the dangers of throwing away an account with a high post count, and starting over with a new one.

[1vRz3TCk]

**** Yellow Wolf post has been removed ****

MikeyBoy, Don't feel sorry for Yellow Wolf, my guess is it is gentleguy. It sure as hell isn't Grey Wolf.

[BHX]

I wonder the same about Timber Wolf too as he misstated what he said in the deleted thread. He blatantly stated he wanted to spark discussion, but then claimed in this thread that it wasn't his intent to start a discussion in that thread.

[1vRz3TCk]

BHX,
Check out the bio...
http://www.cplusplus.com/user/closed_account_z05DSL3A/

[BHX]

So he didn't want a discussion? He just wanted to piss and moan, delete his account, and stomp off? Got it.

The whole point of a forum is to spark discussion and help others. Seems extremely odd to post a thread attacking the state of a site and claim not to want discussion.

[1vRz3TCk]

BHX, you seem to miss read things. It's pointless talking to you.

[Duthomhas]

I am not a fan of the SO MO. It's model allows normal users to abuse others with near impunity.

I know JS is trying very hard to make things work simply here. And most of our problem is currently with one very disruptive individual...

But I would agree that we need to have moderators:

- approved/appointed by JS
- (i.e. not appointed by peers)
- powers limited to:
--- vote to delete a post (post requires two votes to delete?)
--- vote to ban an abusive/spam user (same?)
--- ability to "unroll" a post to previous state?
--- move a thread
--- vote to delete a thread (spam and abuse purposes)
--- cannot moderate in a thread in which they participate (more than zero or one posts?)

I also think there should be some limits on what new users can do. I have particular issue with revisionism. (Which is why I really dislike SO's SNAFU crap.)
- Cannot delete your own posts (flag it for deletion by moderators -- moderators must agree)
- Cannot edit your post to have more than a small amount of change or deletion (addition OK).

My personal opinion is that real discourse only exists when other people don't have the abusive power to silence their opponents and revise their own actions as a community approved goodness.

I can immediately think of about five people here who would make good moderators, even with these specific, limited powers. It wouldn't be any more work for them than their usual care, and it would offload a lot of grief from JS.

/my $0.02

[BHX]

BHX, you seem to miss read things. It's pointless talking to you.

I've not misread anything. I made two assertions, 1)he claimed he wanted a discussion in his "shit" thread and 2)that Timber Wolf wasn't Grey Wolf. Your link only has the bio that says "BHX is wrong."

The way I found out his thread was deleted was because I had quoted where he made a comment about sparking discussion and then ranted about how it was disingenuous to say that then delete his account when the discussion didn't go the way he wanted. I stated that it was the only conclusion I could come to because it looked like he was seeking "Yes!" men to agree with him and when he didn't find any he deleted the account. During the rant I also pointed out that changing the title the way he did made him no better than gentleguy because it was just as childish to tack on (because of users like gentleguy) as it is trolling a site. I did the quick run down earlier in this thread, but I had typed up a paragraph for each point and ended it with a paragraph about how the admin is doing the best he can with the circumstances he is facing day in and day out. Upon hitting submit, I found that admin had removed the thread and one of my epic rants was wasted, to ever float in the ether of the internet.

@Duoas
The thing I don't like about SO is that even with beginner threads they seem awful quick to lock them as off-topic or duplicate. I've even seen a lot of programmers say it is a great place to find answers, but a terrible place to ask questions.

[TheIdeasMan]

I fully agree with Duoas :+)

Without moderators, IMO this site is running a real risk of being overrun by trolls. These days I am very sceptical of a lot of the posts by new users, and there are very few users that I feel I should provide an answer to. Even then, I worry about (in a criminologist fashion) a lot of tactics that might be used by trolls . I don't take anything at face value. I don't think I am the only one, either. There are a number of previously prolific and high quality posters that I haven't seen for quite awhile.

With SO, part of their philosophy is to not have to answer the same questions over and over again. That's the reason why it's easy to find an answer, and rather difficult to ask a new question - most of the questions have already been asked.

[shadder]

got reported first time ever :D

[kevinkjt2000]

Yes, I have to agree that SO is not inviting to new questions. They force the questioner to do a bit more research. I like the approach we take here; it reminds me of walking into the library at uni and asking the seniors questions about C++. That informal social atmosphere is what keeps me coming back here. I enjoy being one of the seniors in that frequented corner of the library.

- approved/appointed by JS
- (i.e. not appointed by peers)
- powers limited to:
--- vote to delete a post (post requires two votes to delete?)
--- vote to ban an abusive/spam user (same?)
--- ability to "unroll" a post to previous state?
--- move a thread
--- vote to delete a thread (spam and abuse purposes)
--- cannot moderate in a thread in which they participate (more than zero or one posts?)

I like this list, so I'll take the time to offer more suggestions:

The voting powers could belong to everyone. Moderators could then look at a tally of votes later and see something like, "Oh, 20 people thought such-and-such was spam. I'll go read that and see. Yup it's spam."

If a user happens to be abusing voting privileges then they could be flagged as troll by a moderator.

Not being able to moderate in threads they participate in would be a bad limitation in the rare event that they were all participating in a particular thread. I suppose if everyone had voting rights, this wouldn't matter to much.

I agree that there should be no automated process of appointing moderators by peers. Strictly the admin picking limits trolls that would make muliple accounts for voting power.

A troll would probably become bored if the few IPs that they had free access to become blocked. If they start paying money for a service to acquire IPs, they are way more determined than most trolls are.

I would like to add
--- ability to flag a user as a rule-breaking, disruptive troll (this is a bit stronger than the regular user votes of spam users)
--- ability to flag a ban for an IP for 1-3 months
Flags like these could be reviewed by the admin.

[1vRz3TCk]

This is an apology and explanation.

First off, I am Grey Wolf. Timber Wolf is an account I created recently and daemon is an account I created some time ago to test out some new features of the site back then. CodeMonkey is an account from a previous time I took a break. By way of proof, if you want it, I still have access to part of the Grey Wolf account and have modified the Bio.

I do apologise to the site admin for any 'drama' I may have caused and I apologies to other site members for flogging a dead horse in trying defend what and how I said what I said.

I was going to go over a few things but decided against it.

____________________________________________________
http://www.cplusplus.com/user/closed_account_z05DSL3A/