do NOT feed the trolls

[der.hans]

moin moin,

once again, I get an appropriate random sig quote for the email.

Flame wars like this are easy to avoid. First and foremost, don't respond
to trolling. The original post in the thread was completely off-topic
and merely a troll post. I'm not characterizing the poster as a troll,
just that one post. Ignoring the post would have been sufficient and
appropriate. That goes for both people who agree with the post and people
who disagree with it.

Secondly, if you find yourself in a flame war and absolutely needing to
respond, sit on it for a while. Give yourself a cool down period before
posting.

Thirdly, for every post, please consider how it will be received. This
goes quintuply for posts into flame wars, especially in a limited medium
like email. Does your post actually add content? Does it add name-calling
or other inappropriate fuel to the fire?  If it's doing the latter, please
take time to remove the fuel. There is no need to attack anyone on this
list!

We have a variety of opinions on politics, religions and gastronomy in the
group. We also a variety of opinions on far more important topics like
editors, mail clients and programming languages :). That's all fine.

Fourthly, ignore threads and posts you don't care about. This isn't about
having thick skin, it's just time management :). I do appreciate those
who try to read all messages, which I have also done in the past. But, if
something just has no value to you please feel free to ignore it.

Fifthly, realize that discussions are generally a good thing. Airing
opionions and getting different perspectives is actually one of the values
of PLUG. We just need to try to keep them constructive and factual.
Listing good features of your favorite $application is good. Listing
actual failings of $other_application is also good, e.g. editors that
behave badly and wipe out files when the filesystem fills up.

I personally don't appreciate the timing on the flame war. I spent Tuesday
night doing something productive, helping with election monitoring. Now,
rather than writing up what I observed as I was supposed to, I need to
deal with an off-topic flame war.

Most of the rest of you can just ignore it. If you don't like the thread
use your mail client to ignore the thread or add a filter or just do like
I did and skip all the mail with the flame war's thread.

As one of the people who works to keep PLUG working I can't just ignore
the flame war's consequences. We are a volunteer group with very few
volunteers keeping things running. I find myself in a position of needing
to find a technical solution to a social problem. Not a good position.

We are always completely open to other volunteers helping out!

Even with more volunteers we will be dependent on the PLUG community being
considerate of others. There's no practical way we can keep up with
dedicated attempts to cause problems. We depend on the community
self-regulating. The community, in turn, depends on individuals to
self-regulate.

It's easy to have a destructive influence. Citizenship is striving to have
a constructive influence.

I know I sometimes fail in this, but I certainly try. I hope this email is
taken as an attempt to be constructive.

ciao,

der.hans
-- 
#  http://www.LuftHans.com/        http://www.LuftHans.com/Classes/
#  Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. -- Thomas Jefferson