but I do have just a bit more to say about this issue (of trolling, etc) - so I'm giving this warning so those who don't care to read it can skip this post...
YB85 said:
... Not that anyone is asking,but here are my thoughts:
1. Hopper's down-on-the-corner posting style from the previous board was unreadable and I feel polluted the board....
overall, I'd say I share these feelings. I could tolerate it in small doses, and every once in a blue moon it was funny because it seemed somehow to be appropriate on certain occasions, but it got to be overused and used in situations where it seemed completely inappropriate and unacceptable to me. If it were used "too much" I think I'd consider it trolling according to this definition from the rules: "...trolling. These include (but are not limited to) comments made solely to provoke reactions, bizarre formatting of posts..." - I would consider it to fall into both of these categories. OF COURSE, the definition of "too much" is subjective and not easily defined, so there is no absolute answer I can give to to help anyone ascertain at what point it becomes "too much"
Hopper said:
...On a related note, the seemingly sincere complaints about "off-topic" comments have always puzzled me. To me these thing just naturally meander, and that hurts no one. Everyone is free to compose any post they want and publish it. If they are interested in commenting about the topic indicated in the thread title nobody is "preventing" them from doing so, as they appear to think....
A couple comments here: Most everyone has made an occasional comment in a thread that is off-topic for that thread. Some of us do it more than others (wink, wink). It may be very annoying to those who are trying to take part in (or at least follow) the "serious" discussion taking place. I have been on some message boards where a single off-topic post results in a "warning" from a moderator. I think most folks around here are pretty tolerant - they may get annoyed, but they just skip over the off-topic post. But when the poster makes repeated, consecutive posts, it gets difficult to skip over those posts without perhaps missing something that is part of the discussion. So folks might consider that type of behavior to be trolling because it is "disrupting the readability" of the topic.
And even if the posts are on topic, I can see where it can get annoying if there are consecutive posts by one poster. For instance, many of us probably have other posters whose posts we tend to "skip" over (or perhaps put on a formal "ignore" list). There can be any number of reasons for this: we feel a poster has a particular agenda, we feel a poster has opinions we always disagree with, we feel a poster makes no sense, or we just plain don't like that poster. Whatever the reason, if we're hoping to save time by skipping over certain posts, but still keep to the topic under discussion, this is again a situation where repeated consecutive posts by one poster might disrupt the readability of the board.
OK, well at some point we may have to relabel this the "Dead Horse" topic, but I'm not completely certain it's been beaten enough quite yet.
(for someone who doesn't like to read long posts, I've certainly written enough of them lately...)