Change #2, change #1 is a lie.

Yep!

rofl

Ayers Rock?

A .00000001/10 moustache with a guy attached!

> xeno syndicated wrote:

> "You do realize that if this was the case, you would have pretty much been voted out of the politics forum, right? "

Actually, Zarf, you have no way of knowing this, and you might actually be very surprised if in fact a vote had occurred.

I do have no way of "knowing" this, correct.  However, in just the same way, you have no way of "knowing" a good result will come from what you suggest.  At the very least, we can use the inferences and evidence we have to come to circumstantial conclusions based on that evidence.

The evidence I use is the fact that you had a good portion of the politics forum... which incidentally is probably the only people willing to read through the massive posts inherent in politics... who decided you were trolling and were refusing to answer your posts.  Were they right?  Were you trolling?  Damned if I know.  What I do know, however, is that people have a tendency to decide that people whom they disagree with are more evil than they are, i.e., that a right-wing politics poster will much more easily accuse a left-wing poster of trolling than he will a fellow right-wing poster.  Is that person trying to kill off opposition to advance his own viewpoint?  Not necessarily.  We generally see people in positive light who are similar to us, and people in negative light who are different.

So what's the problem with it?  The problem is that, within the context of your voting system, there is no check or balance on that.  If the politics forum had, for example, 7 right-wing posters and 4 left-wing posters, the right-wing posters will generally be more likely to accuse the left-wing posters of trolling, and you won't be enforcing against trolling.  You'll be enforcing against ideology.

A moderator is slightly different because although a moderator is just as easily able to abuse their power as a non-moderator, if I, for example, started rampantly abusing my power, someone could come to the moderators and ask that I be sacked.  That gives me a disincentive against abusing my power because I have something that can be taken away.  There's nothing to be taken away from power abusers here.  Unless you want to vote on whether people are abusing their power... but that's just being silly because the same people voting on whether people are trolling are voting on whether people are abusing their power. 

> xeno syndicated wrote:

> Zarf, you'll be placing threads which may be legitimate attempts at honest discussion in this forum, threads mods suspect may be either trolling, spam, or flaming. Inevitably, there will be legitimate threads there, too. 

Based on community members' voting, you might even move the thread back to its original location if it is deemed NOT to be either trolling, flaming, or spam by the community.

Called the forum something like 'Zarf's Court'.  Subforums might be, the "Jury Box" - a thread where only select members of the jury can discuss the fate of the forum poster in question. Or, "The Hot Seat", the 'prison' in which, temporarily, would be the only place on the forum where the suspect poster can post until his trial is over. 

You do realize that if this was the case, you would have pretty much been voted out of the politics forum, right? 

> xeno syndicated wrote:

> I believe I answered them all... trolling me top repeat myself, maybe?  let me check if I missed something...

Yeah... not even close.  Notice the pile of extrapolation which you did in that most recent post... but not in the one prior?

>Moreover, your idea requires a stream of legitimate threads to be thrown into there with the crap threads.  So what happens when people who want to legitimately talk about issues wanes?

I don't think people would ever stop 'legitimately' talking about issues and leave only trolling, because they need to talk lagitimately.  I don't think people who want to discuss things legitimately would stop going to the thread, either, because they would also happen to be entertained quite a lot by the trolling going on...

You're missing the point.  I'm not saying legitimate discussion would nver occur.  However, if I want to actually have a legitimate discussion... there is no reason why I would say "Hey, I got a great idea!  I'll post this thread in which I actually want to debate legitimate issues in the forum where there is a 50% chance it will be interpreted as trolling and ignored!"  No, I would post my legitimate thread in politics, uni news, or wherever else it goes, where it would have credibility as a legitimate thread from the start.  Then you end up having a void of legitimate topics in the troll forum in the first place.  That means the troll forum becomes a pure troll forum because there are no legitimate threads, and the legitimacy of your whole "is it trolling or is it not trolling" farce is gone because legitimate threads would go where legitimate threads would be in the first place.

 
> Unless... the mods begin arbitrarily putting legit threads into the troll thread to maintain the illusion of legitimacy you want to establish for the sake of trolling, which only hurts the good threads."

I don't think it would be necessary for anyone to arbitrarily putting legit threads in a troll thread to maintain the illusion of legitimacy of the troll forum. 

Um... why?  Note the reasoning above.  You can't just say "naaaaah..."

> Besides, wouldn't those threads be troll threads, because they aren't putting the threads in there to have honest discussion, but just to provide the false sense of legitimacy of the threads in the troll forum.

Yes... exactly... because the threads weren't intended as such in the first place.

Your idea is 100% parasitic in that for the troll threads to exist in a form which allows trolling, you require legitimate threads within which the troll threads can hide.  However, legitimate posters don't actually want their threads considered troll threads because that means other people start shunning their forum posts.

> Also, I don't see how it hurts the good threads if people honestly discuss legitimate topics in troll forum.

It hurts legitimate topic discussion because if I want to debate US extended deterrence policy, I generally want to hear people talk about whether Japan or Israel legitimately need US nuclear protection, not "we don't need to protect them with nukes... we've got Chuck Norris," followed by a discussion of whether Chuck Norris should be used for pure deterrence or preemptive warfare.  This shouldn't be hard to explain, and considering how many times you have complained about this exact problem in the politics forum, I'm surprised you don't see the problem.

@xeno

So... are you... not going to answer my issues there?

Hatches his eggs before they count

Well, that too...