Handling of inappropriate but deleted posts

[ChrisRJ]

Hi,

Last evening I received a notification about a thread in the German forum. A person with only 1 other post had more or less accused me of doing advertising for Google and went on to say that if I didn't know the answer I should "shut the f****ing hell up". The words, in that context, were rather aggressive and insulting in my view.

When I went to said thread just now, that response seems to be no longer there. So it seems that either a moderator chimed in or that person deleted their own posting. So far so good! But it got me curious. Is this something that happens on a somewhat regular basis? If so, what is the moderators' perspective on that? Overall I think the tone here is quite civilized. Also the occasional heated debate, of course. But compared to other forums it is truly enjoyable place

Thanks,
Chris

 

[Arwen]

As a plain member, if I see an offensive or spammy post, I press the "Report" button on the post. If their is an option to specify why I am reporting, I give the appropriate information. Most of what I report are spam of the type that have text unrelated to the topic and have a link to what is probably malware. But, the forum moderators here do a good job of keeping unproductive posts to a minimum.

I suspect as long as the "heated debates" never turn insultive to people, or go to extremes, they are probably good for the overall picture. Insulting companies, (with specified cause), is another ball of wax! (For example, I routinely insult a certain CPU manufacturer every time I can get. After all, they ARE The World's Leader In CPU Security Flaws .


Now to be fair, in the early days I started researching FreeNAS, (2014), their were people here who had fixed opinions. And if you did not agree with that opinion, they could get aggressive and insulting. Over time, things changed. The forums are much better now.

 

[Tigersharke]

Also, there is sometimes an attempt to keep conversations on the original topic, which may mean the offending post(s) are ripped out without remorse, or that they're shifted to their own thread and possibly the off-topic section as needed. Even in my view, a thread in 'off-topic' very focused on one topic will certainly benefit from having (especially useful) tangents seperated but preserved.

Spam can take many forms, some are kinda sneaky. One technique is to quote a post to add a comment on it, but then drop the malicious/offending link into the portion quoted rather than the reply beneath.

Offending users will get dealt with, regardless of what sort of offense it is, once it is noticed and recognized. The response or action is generally as severe as the offending content or activity, though we can be generous in some circumstances, to mete out a temporary ban or a reply ban or whatever is most appropriate at the time. Tricky situations or those some of us might prefer not to handle get assigned to those at iX who eventually will, namely, the too frequent "delete my account" request.

I frequently to usually keep an eye on the forums for whatever that needs to be done. Even I can relate that things are much improved overall than they were when I began here just to create the 'Dark' theme (as I had elsewhere -- defunct now).

 

[Ericloewe]

Always feel free to use the report button in good faith.

Offensive post? Report it.
Post is misplaced? Report it.
Post seems spammy? Report it.
A Flame War taking off? Report it.
Post to make into Resource? Report it.
Technical problem for a mod? Report it.

On a more specific note, if there's a problem in the German section, please feel free to message me directly so that I don't miss whatever the problem is.