Don't feed the troll...

[rurpy at yahoo.com]

On 06/16/2013 02:04 PM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> On Sun, 16 Jun 2013 20:16:34 +0200, Antoon Pardon wrote:
> 
>> You are trying to get it both ways. On the one hand you try to argue
>> that there are no boundaries 
> 
> I have never, ever argued that there are no boundaries. I have repeatedly 
> made it clear to Nikos when I thought he was behaving improperly. And 
> I've done the same to others when they've acted improperly.
>
>> to what is acceptable by calling people who
>> do try to enforce such boundaries the Internet Police. On the other hand
>> you do suggest that playing Internet Police is out of bound behaviour.
> 
> Yes. Trying to start flame wars with Nikos is unacceptable behaviour. It 
> is unproductive, it makes this a hostile, unpleasant place to be, it 
> ruins the environment for the rest of the community, it's off topic, and 
> it simply doesn't work to discourage trolls.

The difficulty with trying to suppress such responses is that 
the flamers get just as much pleasure from having a target
to unrestrainedly spew their pent up anger and vile at, as 
the troll gets from simulating that reaction.  The result is 
a positive feedback loop.  

I could be wrong but I don't think Nikos is a pure troll -- 
someone motivated purely by provoking reaction and discord.
He has a real website and his problems with Python seem like 
genuine problems many beginners have.  He seems to have little 
knowledge, not much concern for anyone else but a lot of
determination to get things working.  I have certainly known
people like that in the real world.

I speculate that half of his "bad behavior" is simple "I want 
now and don't care about your conventions".  The rest is a
reaction to "we're the alphas, your a beta" attitude expressed
by many here and later, overt hostility directed at him.  He 
has changed some things -- his posting method, he's made an 
effort to understand his encoding issues, etc.

So I think Steven's approach of responding to his questions, 
at least those that are coherent and don't require reading a 
dozen posts over several threads to piece together, with an 
actual attempt to help (not a bunch of obscure hints, links 
to wikipedia, and "you're an idiot" replies) is right.
If Nikos fails to respond with better questions, then those 
that do answer will get tired of trying to help and stop 
answering.  In the meantime everyone else can just killfile
or otherwise ignore him rather than egging him on by 
intentionally provoking him (unless of course you enjoy
the results.)

So positive reinforcement for less bad behavior, negative 
reinforcement (which for trolling is NO response, not negative 
responses) for more bad.  Standard behavioral conditioning.

And if it doesn't work it will still be a much nicer and 
quieter here with only Nikos' trolling than with 10x as much 
garbage from the local vigilantes who are more obnoxious
than he.