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Expelling A Detrimental Contributor

I believe I've earned the right to post this question. There needs to be some way to expel negative, abusive, unwanted people from this forum. There are always frauds in any community and there needs to be a way to vote them off. If someone by their words and actions continues to demean others and proves to be a negative influence to this august forum I feel, and have from my first week here, they should be exposed and expelled for the good of everyone concerned. If this is out of line I offer my resignation from contribution by a majority vote.

Answered! View the answer I have this problem too

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+ one vote for you to stay. Ralph

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anyone here in 2018?

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I've had nothing but good experiences on iFixit (albeit limited as you can see), due in part to Richard himself, who clearly has a passion for helping people who come to this forum.

There are a number of forum tools available these days, in addition to moderation (WERE you volunteering, Richard? ;-), like vote up/down or vote as contributing/non-contributing. That said, only moderation is going to result in any banning, to the extent appropriate.

Unfortunately, there will always be "trolls" and people who feel like basic manners go out the window just because they can hide behind the anonymity of the internet. Don't let them run you off or make you feel unappreciated, Richard!

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With over 10,000 in rep points now I can delete any question or answer. I've only done so twice on "closed" questions to clear them and one verbally abusive contributor. Such an ability, in my opinion should be exercised very very judiciously. No. I was not volunteering, I would much rather spend my energies helping others as you were perceptive enough to observe. Helping other is addictive and I get angry when an answer hurts another, maybe overtly so. Thanks for your intuitive input. Answer accepted.

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DO NOT FEED THE TROLLS!

The problem we face is, how do we really "expel" anyone from a site that anyone can anonymously sign up for? All they have to do is get a new email address & change their username and we'd never know it was the same person. Also, since you've decided to FOCUS on a troll you've just given them what they want. They're not going to go away, they're going to come back for mischief.

We think it is better for users to keep the same account so that we can see all the actions they have ever done. We know that if someone has 100 posts but < 200 rep they're not a very reliable person. We prefer that to 1 post from 100 different accounts.

If you think the answer is wrong, give them a simple down-vote. If it's offensive, flag it. The only way to get rid of trolls is to stick them in a corner until they get bored and go somewhere else.

Some things, like auto-blocking of someone flagged several times is easily exploitable. If I wanted to be annoying I just create 3 accounts, flags the same post 3 times & poof now you're locked out until one of us checks on you. The iFixit crew is pretty small. We like to spend our time & money creating cool new features, not babysitting the site.

I really haven't thought spammers & trolls were a big issue on the site. It only happened a few times & seemed to be handled correctly.

As to the "vote wars" that have been going around between some users, get over it. You all have good and bad points. The fact that the user has enough rep to down-vote you shows that they're helping some people. One person isn't going to hurt your rep that badly. Mayer, you have > 10k rep & are one of the most respected posters on the site. We all know who you are and would be very sad to see you go. I'm surprised you'd let some punk annoy you so much. You'll never convince them that they're wrong, you're only going to give them more ammo to throw back at you. Which they will gleefully do because there is no way to stop them.

We know who votes for who. We have percentages for where your votes go. We have emailed people. We have admin only tools of crazy power. We feel everyone has the rep they deserve (Except Dave but that's beside the point). Honestly I think this community is growing very well. You have all done an amazing job at helping people fix things & I am very thankful for all your support :)

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There will always be some that don't play well together and I'm sure I know what Richard is concerned about. I made a comment myself recently about a person making himself a forum nanny. I am sure most people mean well and don't realize the results of some of their actions. I wonder if a better system than removal might be for iFixit to name moderators to do the nanny work and let the rest of us do the upticking.

I do feel at this point something should be done for the sake of harmony and to remove negative impact from the newbies we are trying so hard to assist. Ralph

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Thank you for your moderation Ralph. I have the upmost respect for your input, knowledge and wisdom. You're right and the "nanny work" maybe should be done by an employee of iFixit. Then we can all vent on him ;-)

But I still feel more than justified about asking for a removal process.

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No reason to resign, Richard! :-) iFixit would be lucky to have you as a moderator, if that's something you wanted to spend your time doing.

I agree that iFixit has a very professional tone in general, and that tone is something that needs to be protected from people who would turn every conversation into a fight. The guy in question is probably a 15-year-old with no social skills (nothing against 15-year-olds), but since it's not a face-to-face conversation, it's often hard to know who you're dealing with, and anyone who wants to can easily cause a disruption.

Maybe iFixit should have a "behavior policy" (if it doesn't already), and members could then flag a post, at which point if the flag is approved, the violating member gets a stern but friendly iFixit form-letter e-mail stating, "We're sorry, but your post has been removed due to conflict with our behavior policy. Please click on the link to read the policy." And then 3 strikes you're out, etc.

Maybe I'm just a voyeur, but I like the anonymous "flagging" element of the site, i.e. you can "report" someone without having to be the "bad guy". I've flagged a few various items for profanity or rudeness or whatever, and that process seems to work well.

I don't really have an opinion as to who should be able to delete members. Personally, I'm far more interested in learning and answering questions than doing site administration.

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+ This is a reasonable idea. Downvoting has to remain so that we can correct incorrect technical information. Everyone is wrong from time to time, and sometimes the right answer actually changes over time. Flagging is the correct mechanism for this.

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I agree, and that's an interesting point -- on more than a few occasions I've read a response of mine from 6 months ago and been amazed at how off I was at the time, or how much I've learned since then, and then felt the need to revise my own answer.

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I agree with most of this, however Downvoting should still remain for more purposes, such as very badly worded or short answers (as in incomplete), and also for answers that should be comments (unless of course the poster doesn't have the rep for commenting). Otherwise I agree that flagging is great, and it looks like it's worked every time it's needed.

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If you downvote someone over how a question is worded how do you know if the poster grew up using English. This forum is international in scope and I don't feel we should be correcting speech unless its obscene or not understandable. In the later case I would try to find a way to improve understanding rather than place a negative in the form of a downtick. At that point all the poster can do is erase his or her answer and they may not be inclined to try again. All in all I feel downticks should be reserved for infractions. As for incomplete you can ask the poster what they meant and give them a chance to elaborate and make their answer clearer. I guess that's why I've given so few downticks. Ralph

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Not understandable is what I meant, there are plenty of international people here, and what's good is that a lot of us help them in their native language, so poorly worded maybe not, but completely un-understandable is what I mean. As in someone did not take the time to write a coherent answer.

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I think that you're all right - there must be a way to handle trolls and some kind of anti social behavior, spamming and so on (like the other day were our religious "friend" spammed everything.

sure flagging is the only way to handle something at the moment.

moderators and super moderators are a good tool to handle those "problems" - but i think it's a little bit problematic with the concept of this site. so is should be someone from ifixit that should has the "IDDQD" (god mode).

some years ago i was in the cell phone "scene" - there were 2 larger sites in germany and i was in the "expert team" on ons site and s-mod on the other one. - the expert mode was great - it was a area of the page were only selected users had read/write permissions.

that way we were able to discuss about problematic users and the administration took care of them (they deleted the problematic topics or simply kicked them out)

the flagging system is ok, but sometimes it's a little bit slow.

we are an international community - that makes it a little bit harder to handle. not everyone can always be "on" (ok, richard - sometimes i thought you're a "bot", how much sleep do you get?)

karsten (reMacberlin) and i are sometimes very early around, like today when he posted something at around 4am - german time (at that time i had my first coffee). some of you devoted overseas members are also pretty much always online - but it's problematic when a spammer acts and nobody can stop him until the flagging alerts someone who is able to flick the switch.

i think that a flagging system should be able to stop/block a user from doing more damage. i've read the posting from rdklinc and thought: 3 flags from "non noobs" and the user should be sopped, also something like 3 or 4 downvotes of a posting/question should remove the "problem".

surely i've also had my downvotes - even if the answer was correct, and was accepted. but that didn't bother me to much. not that i'm arrogant - i only know that there is always anyone who didn't like the way an other user wrotes, explains or whatever (no richard, you and some others were always constructive ;-) )

richard - leaving this site would be a loss for all of us.

as rdklinc mentioned - you don't know how old the other one is, nobody knows if he is socially integrated and able to do something "normal". how many asked a qustion, got an answer and never came back - no accepting, no comment - nothing (or something like i had -> accpeting the answer and then deleting the whole question)

but that's some kind of "normal" nowadays.

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It is my understanding that iFixit's form of a user with IDDQD is iRobot.

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For deleting trolls I'm fairly sure iFixit has some sort of policy and method.

I'm sure those of us who've been here for a while remember 11team, at first he had some good answers, but then he started being rude and insular to Askers, and also to other contributors, one day he wasn't posting anymore and that was the end of it. We all assumed the iFixit team had done something about it. So it seems that their policy works, and there's no reason for have contributors turn on other contributors, seems like it'd just contribute to those "flame wars" you were worried about.

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mayer will be eternally grateful.