Cindy Ballreich wrote:
lid wrote:
You kill the whole thread??
There's gotta be a better way. When a troll see this, you know he's
gonna be tempted to reply here... and he won't even have to say
anything, just click the Reply button to kill your thread.
My experience is that there are so many people who (for what ever
reason) just can't NOT reply to a troll that the threads are unreadable
anyway. Of course, this seems to depend on the troll. Jax will create a
few flames so I just killfile him and ignore the noise. Neal triggers so
much disruption that it poisons the thread. It's the same deal with with
these anon-remailer-crosspost folks. They rarely start threads here.
But in some cases you'e throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Filters can be overdone.
Me, I killfilter messages of known trolls too, but as for threads, I
filter only the ones that trolls initiate. That helps a lot.
I know I lose some good content. If I had the time, I'd set up a more
sophisticated news reader with better filtration. Right now, sifting
through the chafe to find a few grains of wheat isn't worth the effort.
I can still find specific content with Google if I need it.
It makes me really sad that this situation exists. 80% of my email is
spam. My favorite newsgroups are flooded with trolls. The best mailing
list I've ever been on has been shut down by the owner's isp because
they think it's spam. The web is still useful, but the rest of the
internet's going to hell.
Time to shut off the computer and go sailing.
No need for sadness. I've been on a variety of newsgroups for a decade
or so, never once used a filter and never once been bothered by spammers
or trolls. It takes me about thirty seconds to scroll down through all
the subject headers. If I see a subject and author that looks
interesting, I read the entire message. Once I get to the end of the
subject lines I go up to the "Message" menu pick "Mark as read" and then
all the **** messages are marked as if I read them, never to bother me
again.
Maybe you all need better newsreader software?
--
Stephen
-------
For any proposition there is always some sufficiently narrow
interpretation of its terms, such that it turns out true, and
some sufficiently wide interpretation such that it turns out
false...concept stretching will refute *any* statement, and will
leave no true statement whatsoever.
-- Imre Lakatos