Can we please ban cb88 from the forum?

Off-Topic
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I admit that I don’t read the forum often. But when I do, I always stumble upon many posts, or, more likely, rants of cb88 who seem to have way too much time on his hands, and doesn’t know how to use it productively.

His posts stand out for a number of reasons. His posts are incredibly stubborn, simple minded, mean, repetitive, intense, provoking, or rather trolling, and I could go on and on for hours with this list without wronging him. He generalizes stuff without having, as it seems, any knowledge of pretty much any subject. He just seems to randomly dislike stuff, and is very, very vocal about them.

All in all, I consider him a superfluous drain of energy without any productive or constructive arguments or useful thoughts at all.

He has so much to complain about Haiku, there can only really be one reason why he stays: because we’re the only ones nice enough to let him stay.

I admire the patience, and constructiveness of Pulkomandy’s responses to him, but that’s really the only positive thing that I get from his posts, and I guess there is a toll involved there, too.

Maybe you can give reasons for him to stay other than censorship, because this is not about censoring, just peace of mind, and happiness, productivity. Please speak up! Maybe cb88 is even willing to do better in the future, but I don’t have high hopes for that.

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Completely agree with @axeld thoughts. +1 from me.

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Personally I think sometimes disagreements happen and people on forums express different opinions or different levels of understanding. Maybe he is critical/stubborn/provocative/mild trolling sometimes but he hasn’t done anything directly rude or offensive that I am aware of. Does that require banning? I get that it can be tiresome to explain when someone is incorrect, especially if they are stubborn and started the discussion with a criticism, but I don’t think it’s fair to ban them for that. Maybe I am wrong, IDK. But also: I feel like this should probably be a private discussion with mods and cb88.

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I’ve had unconventional ideas more than once and I’m still on the forum, I don’t think we should ban anyone

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what would that achieve? He isn’t a child, there is no disciplining or something by taking away his ability to communicate about haiku.

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I wanted to make this a public discussion, and give everyone the opportunity to share their thoughts, including cb88.

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I really don’t mind unconventional ideas. That’s not what I found in his posts, though. It’s mostly just unfounded opinions on certain topics without ever presenting any arguments, or even seeing the need to do so when questioned. It’s the incapability to have any form of discussion with him.

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It’s not meant to discipline him, it’s just that I don’t see any need for giving him a stage at this forum. I don’t know why people without arguments are always the loudest, but I certainly like to avoid them.

And this is just a proposal; if you all see value in his posts, then I will have to continue to live with it, just like I did so far.

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I have to agree with axeld. Most of cb88 posts are to just insist on something to be bad, but without explaining why or putting the work to understand/explain the problem or suggest solutions.

Also, they seem to be chosen in a way to get people to try to explain/discuss it with him just to see how long they will keep answering and searching for explanations that he could understand, while simply negating what is explained to him. Like the technical aspect is not important, with the intention being only to make people waste time answering him.

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Its peoples own choice to listen to him or ignore him, he isn’t forcing anyone to give him attention. Not to belittle you but you can also just scroll past his replies

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In a perfect world, no one would give him attention. But you cannot expect that from everyone.

Not everyone has deep knowledge about the topics of his posts. Some people might think there is something about his rants, as he suggests he knows better. So inevitably, someone usually takes the time to correct him. To stop spreading the stupid.

Maybe we could have special troll or jester badges, so that everyone can see not to take his posts for the truth. Or we simply mark posts that overstate opinion as facts, as some social media companies did during Covid-19.

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How many times have his posts been flagged or hidden because of the flags?
If it doesn’t happen that often then people don’t find them annoying, inappropriate or off-topic (and if they do, they should use flags more often).

He seem to have a strong opinion about the way the packagefs was implemented (but if you look through the mailing lists that wasn’t always the case, and he mentioned it’s a good design even though it doesn’t emulate what he finds ideal, so something must have changed afterwards, it would be interesting to know what exactly). In those discussions I’d prefer to see more numbers from either side. One might say it’s cb88 who needs to prove his claims with some facts, and while that’s true in general, the development team can also end it by publishing some performance benchmarking and memory usage results of the tests they conducted with the packagefs (I know it takes efforts and time, and nobody has it but I guess Haiku would only benefit from having those numbers published).

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As long as he doesn’t directly offend or insult people, his messages won’t get flagged (and rightly so).

And since you mention packagefs: of course, it would be beneficial to benchmark it, and measure its memory requirements in a reproducible test environment. However, so far no one has seen the need to do this; it’s obviously good enough in its current state for pretty much everyone. Or in other words: there are more pressing topics.

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Flags are there not only for insults or offences. You stated that you find his posts: “incredibly stubborn, simple minded, mean, repetitive, intense, provoking, or rather trolling”. IMHO, most of that list is a very good reason to flag a post (as “bad behavior” according to the Community Guidelines):

If You See a Problem, Flag It

Moderators have special authority; they are responsible for this forum. But so are you. With your help, moderators can be community facilitators, not just janitors or police.

When you see bad behavior, don’t reply. It encourages the bad behavior by acknowledging it, consumes your energy, and wastes everyone’s time. Just flag it. If enough flags accrue, action will be taken, either automatically or by moderator intervention.

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I can very much sympathize with Axel’s sentiment. I don’t think banning would be appropriate though, unless he’s very obviously breaking a hard rule, like continued obscenities or open insults etc.

IMO, what we could need is a way for users to put other users on their personal “ignore” list (including replies quoting them). Can our forum software do that?

I know I’d be much happier if I wouldn’t have to read from a handful of people. Though, as moderator that would still be a luxery I won’t have…

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Coming daily helps. You will face a negative post once in a while instead of facing an accumulation.
I understand the frustration. It’s difficult to know how to deal with such users.
This said, banning is inefficient. You can always mask your IP and make another account. It just makes harder to skip posts since you don’t recognize the user’s name.

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I very much disagree, breaking a rule hard is not a requirement. That only leads to people bending the rules slightly everytime.

If you cannot behave and are a net negative to the community it is completely valid to exclude someone from it even if the rule is not explicitly written down

The forum “““““Rules“““““ Also explicitly ask people to be respectful, improve the discussion etc. Something that hasen‘t always been done.

As for flagging posts: That isn‘t an argument in either way. It does not matter.

That is not true. In a community like this banning is very efficient. I reckon reddit would have a problem banning people, sure. But here it is quite easy to recognize somebody has come back and masked themselves, or if they choose to come back and their behaviour continues to be reprehensible will automatically be banned again.

In any case in the last weeks/months I was under the impression that cb88‘s behaviour was improving. The recent ICU discussion feels like a return to form for me. I‘m not sure if this is a one-off thing or not though.

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That needlesly splits up threads and makes understanding them three times as hard. Can we not go the moderation route of going „yes we know there is a problem, just shut your eyes“?

Discussions, especially with someone with an opposing viewpoint, are generally a good thing. If there is none however we shan‘t bother.

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If there is something that actually breaks a rule, then I would just report it to a moderator. Otherwise I just wouldn’t worry about it. Banning people that we find annoying is a bad idea. I’m sure I’ve annoyed people with my ideas also. This idea too might be annoying. I actually find people who flag peoples’ posts so I can’t see them, or who ask to remove people from forum (not you specifically, other people have had similar complaints) annoying. It appears to be inflammatory for everyone involved.

I will say my piece about it, or I’ll reply to people I disagree with, but if someone seems to have nothing contributory and it seems like they’re a pest, I just ignore them. I’m on here almost every day, and never had an issue with being inundated by unhelpful comments/topics. I would recommend not getting involved if it takes too much energy to deal with people who may be provoking.

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I’m very much struggling with this. It’s all not simply black and white. The rule to “be respectful” is so soft that it pretty much comes down to how’s the mood of the moderator today.

Therefore, I’m very lenient when it comes to removing posts or more so banning people. To me, it would be desirable to be able to put someone in a personal ignore list. It avoids burdening the moderators with the decision to cut down the noise, or enables me to cut down the noise for myself, when that darn moderator is too lenient again…