Hey trolls, tone it down.

[Gabu]

I'm new, so what's a troll?

"Troll" is a term that originated on Usenet boards a while ago; its basic meaning is one who posts deliberately inflammatory or confrontational remarks with the sole intention of arousing anger and/or "flame wars" (strings of highly aggressive posts exchanged between users).

[Gabu]

Learning to be tolerant of other points of view is not just of benefit to this forum, but its a life skill that everyone needs to learn.

Preach it, brother.

[Gabu]

Hi,
I'm concerned about this.  I added the forum to the site with the desire to have a mechanism for intelligent, thoughtful debate on elections, as well as a means for visitors to help one-another learn more about elections.  I have no desire to see it bogged down with posters only interested in emotional flames unwilling to listen to another point-of-view.  A while back I had mentioned the possibility for a member-only forum, but had enough negative feedback to drop the idea.  Another possibility, however, is to provide a forum by invitation only.  There are enough regular members that I could set it up such that one has to apply for membership or be referred by someone already established.  Thoughts?
Thanks,
Dave

I would oppose this. However Dave, is it possible to set up a "killfile" in which one could automatically ignore all posts from a particular poster? Thus, that person's posts would not show up at all when you view the forum.

I'm not sure if that's possible, but some sort of an ignore feature would be a much better solution IMO.

The only problem with this is that if someone responds to the ignored post, you would only see the response, and that could get quite confusing if the ignored person posts multiple times.

[Gabu]

Hi,
I'm concerned about this.  I added the forum to the site with the desire to have a mechanism for intelligent, thoughtful debate on elections, as well as a means for visitors to help one-another learn more about elections.  I have no desire to see it bogged down with posters only interested in emotional flames unwilling to listen to another point-of-view.  A while back I had mentioned the possibility for a member-only forum, but had enough negative feedback to drop the idea.  Another possibility, however, is to provide a forum by invitation only.  There are enough regular members that I could set it up such that one has to apply for membership or be referred by someone already established.  Thoughts?
Thanks,
Dave

I would oppose this. However Dave, is it possible to set up a "killfile" in which one could automatically ignore all posts from a particular poster? Thus, that person's posts would not show up at all when you view the forum.

I'm not sure if that's possible, but some sort of an ignore feature would be a much better solution IMO.

The only problem with this is that if someone responds to the ignored post, you would only see the response, and that could get quite confusing if the ignored person posts multiple times.

Well yeah, it's not perfect. But it would still be an improvement over what we've got.

If the Forum could be set up to also ignore all replies to those on your "ignore" list, that would be even better. I'm not sure if that's possible, though.

Yeah, I'd imagine it could be done, but it sort if is one of those effort vs. return arguments.  If it would be fairly easy for Dave, I'd say go for it.  If it would be really tough, I'd say that we should just learn to endure, as I'd rather not put Dave through a lot of trouble.  He gets enough of it as it is.