To suggest people should be punished for responding to trolls, is like saying that people who are raped should be punished for not using birth control.

It's not the victim's fault, punish the ****ing troll and leave them alone you utter, utter fools.

That's frankly an extreme and ridiculous analogy, bordering on slippery-slope logic. It's laughable to suggest that any of us are truly "victimized" by idiot posters. It's not a valid comparison. That's like calling the moderators North Korea for their maintaining that their judgment is sufficient to deal with all members and circumstances arising on the forum.

Anybody who chooses to engage in goading a troll, making a mess of the forum, and prolonging drama is partially at fault for derailing conversation, because they have the power and the good sense to knock it off. Staying out of the argument also makes action taken by the staff against the troll more clear-cut, because they don't have to look at the situation and say "well, yes, he's a dick, but this person also called him names, sooooo we can't really call it fairly" as has been done in the past.

If 2 members are going back & forth for pages & pages doesn't it seem a bit curlish to say 'ban him, he started it' after both of them are just as responsible for dragging it on and on?

It shouldn't take a person long to decipher if the other person is interested in a genuine debate or just trying to get a response out of you and saying to someone 'This is pointless, I'm out of here' hurts nobody.

i dont even like guitar but i think he is right here. i always tell trolls im not takin their bait but sometimes u just wanna respond when u see they arent gettin punished and there are seemingly no consequences for them provokin

It's not always that easy to discern someone's motives in irritating the **** out of others. No offense meant, but if the moderators weren't as patient and discerning, not only would all the trolls be banned, but you probably would too.

none taken, ive done absolutely nothin to deserve a ban but lets not make this about me thanks

Which is why you haven't been banned. My point was, you have irritated some people. I've irritated some people. I'm irritating some people right now. If that's all it took to define a troll, we'd all be serving ban-time.

It's just not cut-and-dry, because to be confident in someone's status as a troll, they kind of need a history of inappropriate behaviour. At the same time that they're building this history, they're also building allies, friendships, they're desensitizing some, and amusing the heck out of other people who want to keep them around. Then the "right course" gets convoluted.

We both know people don't work that way Urban. I do what you're suggesting just like you suggest. I've reported posts recently for exactly the reason I refuse to respond to certain members blatant, transparent attempts to cause strife.

But frankly, what you're saying shouldn't happen. If its two "members", neither are trolls. If it's one troll and a member, then the mod team should be able to get involved far sooner than they actually do, if its as "obvious" as you claim it is.

I sympathise that you of the mod team get stick both ways. I also sympathise that you have to form a consensus before you act, but the fact is, where is that consensus?

Is any mod - ANY, moderator, on musicbanter, actually going to stand up and say "You know, that whole sopsych situation was moderated well"?

I don't think you are and I don't think you should. It sprawled, it grew, it became what defined the whole forum for over a week. It resisted all attempts to control it.

If I could demand an answer from each and every member of the mod team, I'd want individuals to answer to this question:

"Why did the sopsych situation take 50 pages, two weeks, two threads, discussions in the shoutbox, discussions in the plug.dj, the input of several ex mods, and the input of every current mod, to solve, and should it have been solved faster?"

I don't care whose fault it is, I'm not asking mods to play the blame game against each other, I just want to know how the **** that happens on a forum with as many mods and as flexible a set of rules, as we have.

The only answer I'm expecting is "It shouldn't. Here is how we intend to fix it".

In cases such as that, I would say that it's up to the moderators to recognize the situation and act upon the instigator before the whole forum gets wrapped up in it. If it reaches a point where people are pointlessly, foolishly squabbling over it and other members are trying to mediate it, then it's no longer just the fault of the instigator. It's a failure of preventative measures and self-control not just on the staff's part, but on the part of every person contributing to the discussion.

Right of course. Because a troll's plan WORKING makes it everyone ELSES fault. Makes perfect sense. In that situation we absolutely have to berate and make villains out of a bunch of decent, normal people who would have decent normal conversations with each other in almost any other situation than being antagonised over a long period and then finding absolutely no consistent line of authority to turn to and therefore feeling forced to act and/or retaliate in order to bring to the attention of said absent authority that something is happening that they should probably pay some attention to.

Get ****ed. Nobody got as heated as they did over any of this **** because they were confident the mods would come and fix it. They did what they did because the mods weren't bloody fixing it.