Forum Guidelines

• Have discussions where people waste time not specifically addressing what was asked in the opening comment
  

• To have the power to remove remove comments or you know have the moderators moderate in forums. I am sick and tired of people adding nothing of importance to the forums I have created to specifically address something. This can be seen with the likes of Mopac and Greyparrot. 
  
• To have rules in the forums which make sure bad faith actors or people who do not care about the topic at hand have their comment removed per the rules. 
  

And that's the problem.

Be the change you want to see in the world or be the reason others change.

What do I do to ensure such trolls don't do that stuff to me? I block and starve them of my attention. Additionally, I actively engage with others around them. People have done the same to me, it's how I learned of how powerful this method is to the user you target.

It's a clean way, completely abiding by the rules, to handle such users.

Anyone can use the ignore and redirect method, so stick to that if you are not willing to risk your enjoyment of the site. 

Worry less about calling others names and branding them as 'trolls' and worry more about being consistent with your own depiction of an ideal user.

You come here violating CoC with this callout thread where you name Mopac and GreyParrot. You then proceed to call them 'filth' who ironically you don't want to spend time with because you want to learn new things and yet you completely deny me advising you to just that.

You need to learn patience, Omar, or you will become the very thing you hate: A forum troll. Don't think you're special or unique in this regard, we are all prone to become that which we hate because like love, hate makes you start to pick up characteristics as you obsess over it more and more. Don't hate, outplay and outsmart. 

There is always the fine line between the right and wrong time to begin engaging a troll who is that severe and as I said previously, that's finesse and requires a lot of observation and trial-and-error.

This is a callout thread as he didn't just allude to them but named some of the users he's calling filth AKA trolls (interchangeable to Omar, it seems). 

The problem is that you can’t moderate based on the validity of someone’s arguments. If someone is simply an idiot and doesnt realise it, is unable to convey their point of view, or is deliberately dishonest - there’s no objective test that isn’t down to the moderators subjective personal opinion.

If the moderator were, say, Trump supporting conservatives - they could probably say the same about either you or I.

Are you for this wild west of anything goes forum page instead of thoughtful conversations if so why?

Ultimately, your request is both too subjective 

and too great an infringement of free speech to implement

It is not moderation's job to keep conversations narrowly focused to the OP topic like some Nazi schoolteacher. 

While I do appreciate that random comments and interjections are problematic for someone seeking a narrowly-focused discourse, they're something all people have to deal with in any social setting.

If someone is deliberately trying to derail a thread with incessant, non-topical posts, then that could be spam, and spam is something moderation can take action to stop. But, unless the content qualifies as spam, it would not seem wise to me to impose topicality requirements on forum discussions, or to give OPs power to police their own threads, essentially making all users mini-moderators (diluting actual moderation authority and making exact standards of behavior in the forums unclear).

Ultimately, your request is both too subjective 

So there’s a couple of things here. 

Save for extreme abuse; the moderators are generally immune from the personal attack clause of the CoC. It’s important that members feel free to openly criticize moderation. That’s why you see bsh, virt and myself being openly attacked by individuals in some threads, posts, debates, etc, and those threads don’t get locked.

This behaviour is not normally allowed against regular members -  hence why multiple

threads and debates personally attacking other members are removed.

Ramshutu was given no such directive.

If we have a standard for saying a flat earther is wrong we can also have a standard for what can be deemed as useful to the topic at hand...You already infringe on freedom of speech by taking a stance against doxxing. Why do you infringe on that basis but not on the basis of making sure people stay on topic?

Black should realize racism is something they have to deal with in a social setting.

You are not for imposing standards upon forums but you are for removing spam

The issue here is one of degree, and your argument treats it as some sort of absolute. 

At its core, this site is about conversation and debate. Interference in the natural flow of conversation and debate should be kept the barest minimum, and not present at all if possible. The barest minimum in this sense is to protect users from harm. Doxxing is a pretty substantial harm. You being annoyed that a flat earther is making some idiotic argument or tangential point is not a substantial harm.

And, importantly, it's not my job as a moderator to pronounce certain views right or wrong--esp. on a debate site. Their are going to be genuine flat earthers out there, and they, like any other user, have the right to debate and discuss those opinions.

If they choose to stubbornly defend those positions in the face of superior counterarguments, then you face a choice: engage or walk away. That choice is yours, but the fact that you face that choice or that it annoys you that you do is not nearly sufficient justification for me to take away their right to engage on this site. 

90% of the time, even on here, arguments don't change people's opinions, and probably 90% of the users on here, myself included, have made stupid arguments or back-peddled in order to salvage our views from argumentative salvos.

Ultimately, then, my job as a moderator is to keep the peace, it's not to evaluate the merits of users beliefs. Anything else would cause me to encroach too much on the free speech here. I can intervene to prevent abusive speech, but I am not going to intervene to prevent dumb or stubborn or annoying speech.

Talk about a false equivalency and strawman...

This again comes down to issues of abuse vs. annoyance, and it's pretty clear that an interjection is nowhere near racism on anyone's scale of social acceptability.

Organic conversation shifts and changes.

Spam is an artificial attempt to redirect that organic conversation, and it is so severe or frequent that it prevents the natural flow of the conversation from taking place, or prevents any conversation taking place.

We've debated the whole subjectivity thing before, and we did so quite thoroughly. I am not keen on rehashing it atm.

And, to be really clear, I do not believe I have ever issued an official warning to anyone *just* for spamming. Those very few people with whom I've raised the issue of spamming in an official warning have had it raised as an aggravating or ancillary factor. So, unless someone went really crazy, I doubt I'd do much about spamming, either.

That last sentence was ungrammatical and difficult to understand. Please re-phrase.

That's really the best that is on offer.