PPR Meta-Forum Thread

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This is a little experiment I've been mulling over for a while, a thread about PPR the forum and not PPR the topics. I'm hoping that people will discuss things they do and don't like about the forum and how it's run, and this might make it easier for both the forum users and the mods who come through to get a feel for how things are actually going here. I don't believe any PPR regular has ever been selected to moderate, so it's been a longstanding concern of mine that this forum and it's unique to WP style will clash with the more rigid interpretation of the ToS that the mods are sometimes forced to adhere to. Hopefully, an open discussion like this can help nip potential problems in the bud and help everyone get the best possible experience out of participation here.

I'll start things off with a pet peeve of mine; quote pyramids and people who don't trim out the posts before the one they're replying to. This quickly leads to one sentence replies attached to a quarter page of nested quotes, clogging the thread and rendering it virtually unusable on a mobile device. I'd really like to see some kind of soft guideline reminding people to please trim unnecessary nested quotes from their postings, as it only takes a second and makes the whole thread much more readable.

Also, if anyone has any ideas about non-draconian ways to cut down on the partisan spam threads, I'd love to hear them as I can't think of any workable solutions.

oh ya, quote pyramids or whatever you call them are certainly annoying. They get almost comical when you get 10+ quotes in.

Something that has always annoyed me was whenever someone breaks down 1 post into a bunch of quotes to reply too. Okay if it's like 2 or maybe 3 points and you're posting something of substance but a lot of times it's more like 10 quotes with a 1 or 2 sentence comment(usually condescending but that goes without saying) for each one. People go back and forth doing that but I don't have the energy to do that

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My terminology might be off a bit Jacoby, but I believe what you're describing is called "Fisking". I used to like it a lot, it can be satisfying and you really feel like you're sticking it to the other guy when you do it. Nested Fiskings can quickly grow out of hand and become unreadable, and I've come to view the style as sort of pretentious and reeking of pseudo-intellectualism. It really looks like you're trying to come off as way smarter than the person who's post you're tearing apart, and that can really backfire if you're cleverness isn't actually that clever, something that's difficult to self determine.

The best way to handle serial Fiskers is to rope-a-dope them with concise posts, it's hard to Fisk an austere and to the point post, and if they reply with reams of text most people will just skim over it or not read it at all. Ruveyn is notably good at this, most of his posts don't exceed a paragraph and yet tend to convey all the information he felt was necessary to make his point. You could do far worse in a role model for posting style in a politics forum.

I never knew there was a word for that ('Fisking')

I have done it on occasion, but yeah, it is annoying, and tends to be done with jerkiness in mind. For being a smart ass rather than having a conversation.

I agree that the best way to deal with that is not to fall into the trap of fisking back, it's hard work and you get really bogged down in tit for tat nonsense. Someone (not to be mentioned as they are an ex member now) loved pulling that s**t. It's really painful on the old ADHD. It gets a one one line or one word answer from me now

I dislike the way the titles and/or OPs of a few posts are deliberately rigged to incite argument rather than discussion. It's an open invitation for people looking for a fight, not people looking for a decent exchange of ideas. The art and music forum, and computer/math/science/tech forums are much better at the latter style of threads.

Just my two cents, since PPR has a lot of regulars that only post in this particular forum, and since debates can get heated (it's politics, so that is expected) PPR could use something similar to this: http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt174575.html

I suppose that you could become a moderator, and ban anyone who posts something that you don't like.

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No one's proposing any sort of brevity rule, we're just discussing techniques for dealing with a certain type of forum blowhard. Nobody is going to restrict your rambling, even though as a private website I don't believe the ADA has any power here.