On Wednesday, 23 October 2019 at 01:12:39 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 10/22/2019 1:40 PM, NaN wrote:
>> That's only trolling if the person saying it is doing so specifically to wind people up. Otherwise it's just regular complaining.
>> 
>> Trolling is literally defined by the intent. You cant say the intent is irrelevant, it's the whole point of trolling.
>
> Whether it's intended or not makes no difference, it's useless and a time waster to every other reader.

It may be useless and time wasting but that does not make it trolling. And the question was how do you define trolling. Not how do you define usless and time wasting.

Just because all grass is green (not true) doesnt mean everything that is green is also grass.

If you want to ban pointless and time wasting, ban that. But dont say we're banning trolling and then bend that definition to include anything you think is pointless.

In fact if you want rules of conduct you'd be better not mentioning trolling at all, just list specific behaviours that are proscribed.

On Tuesday, 22 October 2019 at 22:16:17 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 22, 2019 at 08:40:52PM +0000, NaN via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>>
>> Trolling is literally defined by the intent. You cant say the intent is irrelevant, it's the whole point of trolling.
>
> I think you missed Walter's point. The crucial operating word here in Walter's post is "specifics".
>
> No matter how "trollish" a complaint may sound, if it contains a description of a specific problem, such as "D sucks because when I tried to import std.zip, it gave me error XYZ!", then action can be taken to ensure that the same complaint will no longer be valid in the future. Regardless of how "trollish" the intent behind it may be, such a complaint is actually useful because it points out actual, specific problems that can be addressed.
>
> But when a complaint is vague and has no specifics, then no action can be taken. Saying "D is no good" is non-specific, and inherently unfixable, because even if you try to make D better in the general sense, that doesn't mean the author will think that it's better now. He can continue repeating "D is still no good" forever, and you can never fix the problem because the problem is non-specific and undefined.
>
> Usually, the reasonable response to a non-specific complaint like "D sucks" is to ask for more specific details.  But when all efforts to obtain specific information fails, then it becomes clear beyond any reasonable doubt that the author is just mud-slinging; he does not actually have a specific problem in mind but is merely making vague complaints that can't ever be addressed. The persistent evasion of specific complaints proves beyond doubt that the intent is to troll, not to help.

No I got his point. If it's just pointless complaining that nobody can do anything about then it's trolling, even if its not meant that way the result is the same.

I dont agree, just complaining even pointlessly is not trolling. If it keeps going on and on and the poster doesnt want help or isnt interested in the issue being addressed in some way then you can say they are "probably" trolling. Thats pretty much what you say in your last paragraph.

But dont redefine trolling from the wrong end. Trolling may be a waste of time, but being a waste of time isnt trolling.

Is I said im my other reply you be better to say..

Drift off topic and your posts may be deleted.
Flogging a dead horse and your posts may be deleted.
Personal insults and your posts may be deleted.

Dont even mention trolling.

But there still needs to be an off topic group imo.

On Wednesday, 23 October 2019 at 00:24:03 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:

> It probably doesn't create the best impression for corporate users.  Imagine you're a guy in a tech team at JP Morgan trying to persuade your boss to try using D.  And there's some announcement of something that should be an occasion to build constructive energy and ends up becoming another why D will never succeed thread. What sort of impression is your boss going to form of things?  Quite a lot of corporate people are quite superficial and swayed by social factors, but I suppose they are also often the ones with the money to decide.

I'm not using Slack, right now it gives the impression of being 'semi-official', as it's not mentioned neither in the Community menu of the site, but I was told that discussions are productive and positive over there.
Maybe, it's because it's 'semi official', so, what about keeping it 'invite only', but provide a read-only view of the best channels? For sure it's a net increment of positivity.

I've also suggested to improve periodic reports around the status of specific work topics: something like the ones provided for SAOC, see the FreeBSD periodic status reports [1] provided by workgroups. Yes dub, I'm looking at you!

As a final point, I also suggested some days ago to add some features, like locking a thread, to the forum interface only.

[1] https://www.freebsd.org/news/status

/P

> Providing actionable feedback is certainly better, but do you think moderators should remove non-actionable criticism?  If I just said, "I don't like dub", should that be removed?

Trolling is always context dependent. We cannot be picky like that.

Making strict rules does not necessarily mean that you must apply them strictly.

But they are a sort of boundary, a sort of frame.

In fact, when a newcomer comes into the forum, just by reading some posts, he should FEEL by himself how people generally behave. He does not even have to specifically read the rules. He should know, and then he's implicitly incited to behave.

But if he sees that everyone is throwing names at each other, and random guys can come in and puke on the language without suffering any consequences, then why would he make any efforts?

Of course, people will "play" with rules, cross them etc, and it's fine, we're humans. It's at the appreciation and wisdom of the moderators.

> It also sounds hard to say whether or not something is "actionable".  Technically, saying "D is no good" is actionable.  Making D "better" could be a reaction, though it's very vague.  So to me it sounds like your saying, vague and general criticism should be removed?

We should not go in that sort picky details. Again, it will be left at the appreciation of the moderators.

In all the internet forums I've seen, the only one by far were the ambiance was friendly was a latina dance forum (yeah, I know) where we were talking A LOT about politics and religions and the most polemical subjects we could even find (and "R-value ref" was not one of them :) ). And the forum worked and everybody was happy because:
- The moderator team was strong and fair.
- The rules were clear: no "ad hominem" etc.
- If someone was crossing the line too many times, he would be warned by private messages.
- There were only a few unhappy members that claimed the forum was not a democracy and that the Big Chief Moderator was a dictator. But everybody liked him and nobody took those guys seriously.

On Sunday, 20 October 2019 at 21:03:52 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
> I find that hard to believe. If I was going to build a business around a language and the only official forum had stuff like that on thread after thread, I'd look elsewhere. I've never seen it with another language.

It is a discussion forum, and any discussion is inherently competitive and tiresome, you can't ban that. An easy solution is to reduce your consumption of social media and your mental health will improve.

On Tuesday, 22 October 2019 at 13:41:58 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 10/21/19 5:45 PM, welkam wrote:
>> And all the C programmer need to pay more attention when writing their code so they would not get buffer overflows.
>
> Nice simile. I agree there's plenty of evidence ever since the Internet has been invented that just giving people advice to not feed the trolls doesn't work.

I added new word to my vocabulary that I would not use in the future :D

It doesnt work not only for not feeding the trolls. It applies to pretty much everything where humans are involved. For programmers you can carefully check your code, write tests, have other person review your code and still bugs get trough. We humans are flawed and fail constantly and our systems need to take that into account. If you create a system where success is solely dependent on good will of the people or them being excellent it will fail.

That is the biggest reason why communism always produces bad results. While they correctly identify problems with capitalism their solution to the problems depends on people being smart and when making decisions they should prioritize betterment of all instead of personal or family gains. In practice people make decisions that benefit them and their family.

A good example of system that takes human flaws into account is science. Scientist fights constantly with bias and have many systems to help with that and they regularly produce awesome stuff.

On Tuesday, 22 October 2019 at 19:11:39 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> Buffer overflows are unintentional. Replies are intentional. The analogy isn't apt.

I dont agree that its useful or correct way of looking at this. If you could ask people before they go on this forum whether they want to post the things they do in response to some messages they would say no but they post it anyway and regret afterwards. I would not label that kind of behavior as intentional.

Some emotions are really good at making/forcing us to engage with a content. Anger is the best one at it. This should explain to you why some things get viral on twitter or why media wont stop talking about Trump. Any way in a forum the size of this a message that successfully triggers anger emotion to the reader are guaranteed to receive a response.

If you still think that there is a choice involved here think about click bait. Its universally disliked and still keeps working.

Please dont use the term troll here. Its poorly defined, can mean different things to different people and depends on intent of the poster. We should not care about intent when moderating and only care about effect of the message.

Second philosophical debates about censorship while interesting would only muddy the waters and distracts from what needs to be done.

The problem is that some people here constantly degrading discourse by derailing conversations, bringing up topics that were beaten to death without providing nothing new, directly or indirectly calling/treating others like an idiots, increasing negativity without any benefit. We need to stop this kind of behavior and do not let few people to lover the level of this forum.

My suggestion is to threat this the same way as legal system threats harassment. In legal system harassment is not described as specific thing that has been done but as a pattern of behavior. If you have been called names by a person its not harassment but if you are being called names everyday by the same person then its harassment. So if a person does a drive by posting of D sucks no action is needed but if the person keeps posting the same thing over and over a disciplinary action needs to be taken. My suggestion would be to issue a warning first and if nothing changes do a temporary ban from posting. If nothing changes a permaban is needed.

Things to not do:
- Do not delete posts and threads of new people complaining about D. While they usually do not contain any good ideas or anything that we already didnt know they do provide a way to know painpoint that users experiance.
-Do not overmoderate oftopic posts. Even if a person was deemed to constantly derail conversation and disciplinary action was taken his/her post should not be removed.

On Saturday, 19 October 2019 at 12:59:40 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
>
> In my own opinion, what we should not start doing is banning people simply for expressing displeasure with the language or disagreement with its leadership. Yes, I understand that there are a handful of people who seem to do nothing but spread negativity and be contrarian. I disagree with almost everything those guys post. But that *is not* a bannable offense, nor should it be.
>
> I also don't want to be deleting negative posts just because they're negative. Then we get into the business of deleting replies that quote them, and maybe even losing some actual useful signal in all the noise.
>

It was Machiavelli, I believe, who argued that one should kill his detractors to stay in power. I tend to agree with him. If you want to get shit done, naysayers in the least will erode your own will and you'll end up like in a paradox like Andrei Alexandrescu who stated on those forums in past that, and I paraphrase, "My dream job is the worst job I ever had".

But also, pay attention to what you label trolling and negativity, even if sometimes will be very hard to walk the line.  Because if you do not, you risk bathing every day in your own intellectual cesspool and that's the last thing you want. It's not funny being there.

Also, changing the rules of the forums in itself will do nothing for D language by itself.Too many times when shit hits the fan people change leaders, invent new rules, codes of conduct only to find themselves in the same precarious position as before. Cause changing leaders without changing  the culture of the organization generally results in the same old song. D needs to find it's culture, it's identity, both as programming language and organization .

D needs strong leadership, more action and less talk, if it is to raise to any prominence. Get shit done should be the new mantra of D leadership. If you want D to succeed, you need direct leadership, not leadership from shadows and immeasurable delays to DIPs and other requests to D project management. Maybe the leadership should also read "Extreme Ownership" by Jocko Willink and "The mission, the man and me" by Peter Blaber to help them negotiate the extremely complex dynamic of an open source project of this scale. Yes, books written by military man. Books on getting the shit done. Today, not in 2 years from now.

On Wednesday, 23 October 2019 at 21:23:15 UTC, welkam wrote:
> We need to stop this kind of behavior and do not let few people to lover the level of this forum.

You can't increase the level of this forum by protecting stupidity though, it's oxymoronic.