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Posts: 11,700 | Thanked: 10,045 times | Joined on Jun 2006 @ North Texas, USA
#107
Originally Posted by qole View Post
II usually keep one or two of these threads in my subscription list for fun, but mostly I ignore them.

We're all smart people here. Honestly, we all know what to do.
  • Unless you're a moderator going in to close a thread or something, don't bother with provocative troll threads. Don't even read them. You've got way better things to do.
  • Don't try to play forum paladin here. Nokia doesn't need defenders from trolls. If you're posting defenses against FUD, you're actually part of the problem. No seriously, cut it out. If you are a Maemo employee and you post a defence that includes some new information, that's different.
  • If you notice that a young thread is a few pages long and very active, it is probably going to be noisy. If you're the type that doesn't like that atmosphere, stay out. If you don't like crowds, you don't walk into a pub that is standing-room only, do you?
  • Use the "thread search", "forum search" and "power search" functions in the forums to find stuff that you're interested in, rather than just visiting the "New Posts" page and jumping into the most active threads.
  • Get involved in some actual development / testing / wiki maintenance work around here. You'll find your opinion of the forums improving.
I'll take exception to part of that with this caveat: proactive thread moderation, ie steering the topic, can go a long way toward defusing troll-type threads (rather than simply closing them, the easy way out). In fact this forum is full of threads that started off as troll outbursts and were quickly rendered into productive dialog. Even OrangeBox had a couple.

Unfortunately, we come up lacking in the area of proactive moderation, and instead highly rely on the reactive flavor.
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