Comments on: Requests to the lazyweb

By: vernaculo

vernaculo — Thu, 18 Nov 2004 03:41:12 +0000

Een Trowe is een mythisch schepsel van de Eilanden van Orkney, wat op de Skandinavische sleeplijn gebaseerd is. Het overzees Trowes levend onder het water en is zeer lui. Zij zijn naar verluidt nocturnal, en zelfs wanneer zij uit bij nacht komen, zijn zij onzichtbaar aan velen. Trowe is Scots voor sleeplijn. – “De wet, in zijn majestic gelijkheid, verbiedt de rijken evenals de armen aan slaap onder bruggen, om in de straten te bedelen, en brood te stelen.” Anatole France – Er is een theorie dat de sleeplijnen een ver geheugen van moderne man’s ontmoeten met Neanderthals zijn. Sommigen beweren ook dat Neanderthals goed in historische tijden kan geleefd hebben, en kan worden herinnerd zoals sleeplijnen.

By: Patrick Nielsen Hayden

Patrick Nielsen Hayden — Wed, 17 Nov 2004 23:38:20 +0000

It’s actually important to this method that the affected text should be decodable—for the sake of the disemvowelee and for everybody else’s sake as well.

By: Josh Narins

Josh Narins — Wed, 17 Nov 2004 22:41:21 +0000

Revowel Script: Heh, ask the people who reinvented Hebrew, or the ones who translated the Tanakh (Old Testament). Troll Hole: Great. Actually, even better, imho, than disemvowellation would be ROT13.

By: Henry

Henry — Wed, 17 Nov 2004 22:02:44 +0000

Patrick – having checked out Mt-Disenvowel, it seems a bit of a blunderbuss approach – you identify all the posts coming from an IP address and automatically disemvowel them. I prefer Teresa’s approach as you describe it – it seems to provide a much better signal of what is acceptable behaviour and what isn’t.

By: msk08

msk08 — Wed, 17 Nov 2004 20:21:59 +0000

Translate your offensive comments to Navaho. Not even the smartest Germans could figure out that language, and there will be a whole nation of Navahos that could earn some extra dough by doing that for you. Plus we could all learn a foreign language, which would make the liberal arts people very happy.

By: sennoma

sennoma — Wed, 17 Nov 2004 20:20:05 +0000

Tim: the troll hole is sheer genius. I want one! How do you implement it?

By: PZ Myers

PZ Myers — Wed, 17 Nov 2004 18:07:44 +0000

I’ve been running into this problem with trolls myself, lately. It’s not so much that that they make stupid arguments (they do), it’s that they turn every thread into an annoying wrangle over the prancing nitwit. The best solution would be if everyone could just ignore them, but it seems that having someone jump into a discussion and announce, “look at me, look at me, I’m a f*cking moron!” is just an irresistible target to even intelligent people. My current solution is whiteout. I set their comment text to white, on a white background. It’s still there, but you have to select it to see it.

By: Patrick Nielsen Hayden

Patrick Nielsen Hayden — Wed, 17 Nov 2004 16:37:29 +0000

Another advantage of disemvowelment is that it can be limited to small portions of posts, without rendering either the rest of the post or the rest of the discussion incoherent. Practiced with this kind of care, it also helps convey a clear message about exactly what is and isn’t considered to be over the line. (I’ve even seen people in Teresa’s comment threads practice pre-emptive self-disemvowelment on their own posts, as a wry acknowledgement that they may be losing their cool.)

By: Dan Hardie

Dan Hardie — Wed, 17 Nov 2004 16:23:51 +0000

I think we’ll politely agree that my criticism of Henry was a little OTT - you know, Squadristi, Red Guards…

By: harry

harry — Wed, 17 Nov 2004 16:10:50 +0000

If a clever troll reads this thread they might pick up from the debate between Henry and Dan Hardie the idea of leaving competely reasonable-looking pre-disemvowelled comments on a thread to make the host look like a jerk.

By: Dan Hardie

Dan Hardie — Wed, 17 Nov 2004 15:42:40 +0000

I think I’d add that the worst humiliation for trolls, users of abusive language, childish individuals etc is to leave their contributions intact, above their names. If, for example, one goes to Chris Bertram’s thread about Orwell, one will see… But I leave you the pleasure of discovery.

By: Bryant

Bryant — Wed, 17 Nov 2004 15:41:12 +0000

Yeah, I wrote that plugin a while back. It’s not very good, doesn’t handle accented vowels, hasn’t been checked with 3.0 or 3.1, etc. :)

By: Dan Hardie

Dan Hardie — Wed, 17 Nov 2004 15:27:32 +0000

Fair enough, Henry, there’s nothing I can think of that would make some people engage in rational debate.

By: jet

jet — Wed, 17 Nov 2004 15:05:35 +0000

Please don’t dsmvwl m. Sht, t lt.

By: Henry

Henry — Wed, 17 Nov 2004 14:42:03 +0000

Dan – I think you’re going a bit over the top here. The nice thing about disemvowelling is that it leaves the comment there, and more or less readable. If the owner of the blog disemvowels perfectly reasonable comments, (s)he is going to look like the idiot, not the commenter. Thus, I don’t expect much takeup from the likes of LGF, who want to exclude the possibility of conversation with others who disagree with them altogether. Bad Jim – my policy on trolls is more or less as follows. For the really nasty ones, I delete the comments outright – there was a persistent anti-Semite who we had to deal with a few months ago, who I simply deleted on sight. When people make very (as opposed to extremely) offensive remarks, I give them a warning or disemvowel them. My category of ‘offensive’ covers people who use bad language to no useful effect other than to offend (the odd bit of saltiness I have no problem with), who express the wish that their ideological opponents were dead etc, who keep on characterizing their opponents in ways that are offensive and shut down debate, or who accuse me or other CTites of lying etc etc (I don’t mind being accused of being a naive lefty, of hopelessly misunderstanding this, that or the other, but just ask that you don’t descend into silly slurs and insults; it’s our blog after all). Other CTites have their own policy (we don’t have a universal approach) – but probably we’re all within a reasonably narrow spectrum. The Israel post was an experiment to see if much more vigorous moderating than usual could produce a proper conversation on a topic where there aren’t many proper conversations in the blogosphere – thanks to the persistent efforts of people on both sides of the debate to resume mudflinging, it failed.