Reply #118: "Ignore" Features never work.... [View All]

[Techn0Girl]

I'm here to tell you that it doesn't work. I have been on internet and/or compuserve forums since 1984 - 25 years. I have been on hundreds of forums. I have seen trolls. I have seen troll gangs. I have seen people try to defend against trolls. An for a short time I operated as a troll once when I went through a period of idiocy myself.

I can tell you that "ignore" or filter features NEVER ever work. Ever.
I can only speculate that poeple have too much natural curiosity to use such a feature en masse. At best only 10% - 20% tops of a forum's membership will ever self regulate like that. The vast majority will either have too much curiosity or too little common sense to do such a thing.

And if all else fails , trolls and disruptive people will organize into various camps and create false arguments and flame wars amongst themselves to attempt (almost always successfully) to draw others in.

Filters never work in forums.
People are never able to self regulate en masse.
That's 25 years, a quarter of a century of experience , talking.

The only effective means of improving the signal to noise ration is a strict moderation policy.
The only user centric moderation policy that I have ever seen in 25 years that also works is the one that Slashdot maintains but this takes a HUGE amount of computer code to implement. It's almost certainly out of the question here.