The amount of time Kate puts into this blog is astounding and the effort the guest and regular bloggers do while she is away is equally admirable.
This summer she is campaigning a very good dog, best Mini Schnauzer bitch in the US at the moment (Breed standard). Given the success of Venus and the requirement to keep ahead of the competition Kate has been and will be away a lot this summer.
Recently, SDA has suffered from a plethora of trolls, such a pox that it has become difficult for the guest bloggers to keep up. They are volunteers with lives of their own and it shouldn’t be on their shoulders to keep deleting the ‘N’s and others. The standard fare this year seems to be starting off reasonable and degenerating into the lefts worst nightmare. Some sort of proof device, I gather. Please do your best to ignore these fools.
For my part, I will be much more diligent than I have been in the past and there will be no mercy. IP ban and deletion of all comments. That’s for whomever I or the guest bloggers decide is a troll.
For everyone else, please keep your comments on topic and related to the post at hand. If you feel that you’ve been arguing a point five times…well, you probably have. Stop doing that, please. As the comment note says, “Take your extended debates and/or flamewars to private email.”
Thank you all for your participation in SDA, it wouldn’t be the best site on the ‘net without you.
Cheers,
lance
Oh, Go Riders!
I hate to see ALL troll comments deleted.
Abusive, seriously rude or vulgar I can understand, but for comic relief alone I would keep the rest. I personally will try harder to ignore the true trolls, unless I am one of course. :O)
Thanks Lance for your work on the site. Great news for Kate that she excels once again. Trolls are like bad drivers on the highway, you keep an eye on them and go around as best you can.
Good luck Kate!
I often wonder how Kate runs this blog (which any honest lefty must admit is a huge public service) and maintains a life at the same time.
Thanks Kate, and I hope you and Venus earn a total victory.
Lance – your comments and vigilance re trolls will give them one of their favorite treats – a sense of victimhood. Let the witchhunt begin!
Lance, as one of the worse troll-baiters, I hear and obey. The idiots are set to -ignore- for the duration.
Never mind the football. Go Kate!
I read this blog regularly but don’t post often as I am usually reading while on break at work (y’know? Work? That activity that most of the trolls here try to avoid since they feel entitled to other people’s money to support them). I sometimes post on leftist blogs and they always lose their $hit when someone dares to disagree with them. Thats when the insults and references to being an inbred, meat eating murderer and climate change denying ba$tard usually happen. It’s quite disturbing at times to see the neuroses of the liberal mind get spewed at you when they feel you are a threat to their “beliefs”. All logic and reason goes out the window. They won’t try to engage in logical debate, they just resort to hollow rhetoric and insults to your geneology since they believe that a liberal with an arts degree is somehow supposed to make a person genetically superior to others. Yeah, try to get a job with those qualifications.
The trolls I see here are a lot like those I know in real life. My left leaning acquaintances and friends are usually too gutless to say anything to my face but will make snide comments online on Facebook, Livejournal, etc when they disagree with my points of view. However, they will not engage me in debate or talk any crap to my face as they know that they cannot back up any of their emotional rants with facts or logic. Also, they know that if they wanna get really offensive and insulting with me that I will back hand them. I’m a 220 lb male who has spent most of his adult life in the army. I don’t take crap from mouthy retards and they know it.
There are a few of my left leaning friends, however, that do present a coherent argument and are challenging to talk with in debate. These guys are true classic liberals, not the nanny state idiots of today who want the government to take care of them from cradle to grave. They are are a rare breed nowadays and very enjoyable to engage in debate and exchange of ideas. Sadly, none of the liberals who post here are as intelligent or well informed. But then again, I’m sure the majority of them are unemployed or merely working part time while they are students at Ryerson getting their minds turned to mush by Wendy Cukier.
Troll is of course a Norwegian word (‘The noun troll comes from the Old Norse word for a mythological monster.[7]’)
So following standard leftwing “logic”;
A lunatic Norwegian just committed a horrible crime.
Troll is a Norwegian word.
Inevitable conclusion is local trolls are sympathisers,capable, and also guilty of said crime.
Hope that is not really true of course, but i think whacky logic displayed by trolls does provide the contrast media to prove the fallacy of msm and leftie elite “thought”.
True gibberish spewers without any intellectual effort in their postings i skip after the first time reading them.
Oh, and since i lost a bet:
Go Tabbies!
Robert L, well said. Thanks for your service. As you know there are a number of people that comment here who have taken the Queen’s shilling.
The tough part of adhering Lance’s admonition is how to decide what constitutes legitimate debate and what is a response to a fly-by smear. It can be a fine line on occasion.
“If you go to a jazz blog you might be surprised that all the comments are positive about jazz. Or a blues blog.”
Very true. In the heyday of “Dust My Broom”, no one ever blogged in to post ,”boy I sure hate that B.B.King”!
I miss DMB. Sigh.
Ken, I agree. Sometimes there’s a fine line . . .
I’m a teacher: we start where our students ARE and, FROM THERE, move on. So, even if the poster is a troll, I find that his/her astonishing ignorance and mental “midgetry” often make a fine starting point for setting the record straight—with both facts and a coherent argument that puts them together.
I never intend my response for the troll alone: s/he will probably ignore information and good sense. However, there will be a lot of SDA readers who will be interested in what I’ve got to say and then will be able to add something to their ammunition to refute nutty, left-wing memes. I certainly use other posters’ reasonable responses to trolls to widen my knowledge and strengthen my debating arsenal.
Extended, negative back and forths, though, are very unwelcome. (It’s really nice to think that Alex won’t be hijacking any more threads . . .)
Posted by: Robert L at 10:16 AM
Very well said!
And thank you to Kate for this great forum. Now I miss the MSM less and less. Good riddance.
I find, lookout, that I can address an idiotic comment by a troll by simply addressing the issue, not the troll. I won’t write his or her name, quote from his or her comment, or in any way acknowledge or engage them.
I’ll simply make the point, paraphrasing, if I must, their nonsense.
They like the attention, they like to see their name in print, and they like to see SDAers go ballistic. I simply won’t go there. And, nine times out of 10, I don’t even bother to answer their blathering! Because, what you usually find with trolls, is that they make the same points over and over again, ad nauseum. ‘Cut off their oxygen, and they wither!
Cheers!
Go Bombers!!!! (on topic)
I’m with Revnant Dream on this one. I like SDA because it’s not the CBC.
Banning goes against the tenants of free speech/ freedom of expression. Not all trolls are alike. Perhaps each troll should be dealt with individually as opposed to a blanket ban on trolls.
I think the rules that are already in place are working just fine, but it’s not my blog.
I see that it’s not a blanket ban: my bad. I’m still for freedom of speech/expression.
I think the real problem is that the current flamewars and extended debate rule that applies to everyone, has rarely needed to be enforced in the past because regulars tend to respect these rules; whereas, some of the new trolls do not respect these rules at all and are commenting here to simply start flamewars and extended debates period.
Consistent enforcement of the rules already in place may solve the problem without having to resort to banning.
What if the troll is like Alex and insists and apparently believes he’s not a troll? I admit, mocking Alex has amused me in the past.
I hope sda isn’t going to turn into the mirror image of lgf, where people are banned for sneezing the wrong way…
DON’T BAN THE TROLLS. If you want to defeat your enemy, you have to know how he thinks. (SUN TZU) Yes they are annoying, but they occasionaly have a point of view that has to be taken seriously. Don’t go overboard though. As it says below the “post a comment” line.
Don’t block new, she’s all kinds of funny somethimes