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Sir Wolf:
what? i hate rules! its against the constitution! i'm gonna troll, i'm gonna flame, i'm gonna be rude i'm gonna go sit down now my head hurts form thinking to fast ;) hehehe

Sir Edward:

Hah, funny :)

Sir Edward:

--- Quote from: Sir Edward on 2008-07-31, 14:11:51 ---
It's hard to explain. It took on the guise of trying to understand what people were saying, but then nit-picking their choice of wording... implying that the word "extant" was evasive for instance. And asking the same question again and again and again in the same thread, despite the crystal clarity of the answers received. It was as if the person wanted to start a semantics argument. And that was just one thread.

You're right, there's little risk now, but no forum is immune.

--- End quote ---

I just wanted to add that these sorts of things happen as misunderstandings all the time. It's not a big deal if it happens once. A moderator (or other forum members) will ask someone to stop, they apologize, and life goes on.

It becomes a problem when, instead of cleaning up their act, they either get defensive or make a misleading apology, and then proceed to continue with the problematic behavior (or a different problematic behavior). At times it's even clear from the start that they had an intention of disrupting the forum, rather than engaging in proper discussion. That's trolling. :)

Of course, sometimes people forget how their messages might be interpreted, and don't realize that they're crossing the line. That's the nature of the internet. Usually just politely pointing it out is enough to solve these cases. When I worked at UUNET, we had a rule of thumb for sending emails within the company. Basically, if you could add the words "you dumbfuck" at the end of a paragraph without altering the overall tone, then you've gone too far. :)

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