Re: Dealing with trolling
Warning: the following is unlikely to be interesting, unless you agreed with MJR
MJR:
The reason people ignore the thread opener is because it's trolling, not
because it targets debian-women.
If Steve Langasek had continued to ignore it, rather than posting
flamebait, I wouldn't have asked that question.
Steve Langasek always ignored the thread opener. He only answered to
your mail, since it was "dignifying this waste of flesh".
It's very bad form IMO to send personal messages to lists.
If I understand well what you mean by personal, here's my analysis of
this thread until my reply:
*Thread opener intended to waste everyone's time
Not personal
*Your first reply pretending to attempt reasoning the troll
Personal
*Steve Langasek's reply asking you to stop feeding
Personal
*Your reply pretending that you were following some good advice in your
first reply
Let's say personal, although Steve's mail represented most people
*My reply asking you to feed in private
Personal
As you can see, labelling a reply as "personal" or not requires
determining how many people the person being replied to represents. If
you complain that I sent a personal reply to the list, you presumably
don't consider your first reply as personal. Which means that you
believe that the troll represents several people. I disagree and don't
think that anyone, including the troll himself, is stupid enough to
believe what the troll wrote.
Not troll-feeding, but troll-challenging.
I'll leave it to you to decide if you fed the troll or not.
As for challenging trolls, you got a bad start. You seem to naively buy
a pretention to be
Attempting to discredit a group by posing as a member of that group,
and posting inflammatory messages to give the appearance that the
group espouses such opinions. This type of troll usually gives him or
herself away fairly quickly.
while our troll is
Wasting others' time: One of the greatest themes in trolling is the
idea that a troll can spend one minute of time posting a troll,
causing multiple other people to waste several minutes of their time,
catalytically affecting others. Most trolls enjoy the idea that they
can waste others' time at comparatively little effort on their behalf.
(quotes from Wikipedia)
Your behavior *might* have been appropriate if the troll was trying to
discredit Debian, but you're dealing with a troll trying to waste
others' time. Wasting your own time, and more importantly, other
readers' (even more), is the wrong approach.
Thanks for reminding
everyone that #debian is not a fun place any more, too.
As long as you consider yourself as everyone, I guess it's a pleasure.
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