[wp-forums] Troll-ish activity in the support forums

[Jan Dembowski]

Posting to this list is the right way to go.

There's no way to tag users like that and I myself don't think that would
be necessarily useful. Having that capability for users could easily become
"let's vote that guy off of the island". That would be bad too. ;)

*Drinks more coffee*

I don't think you're being too sensitive but there's already ways to deal
with this.

As you've said it's not exactly trolling and some forum members just don't
understand what they're doing. When that happens a shoulder tap works best
as in "Sorry, what are you trying to accomplish by all of that?"

Or they are trolling: occasionally a user will leave 20+ identical 1 line
reviews for 20+ different plugins or bad identical replies to multiple
topics. That does happen and those posts may be deleted.

When you see that behavior you can tag those topics with modlook or report
activity to this list and that will let the moderators what's going on.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Forum_Welcome#Contacting_the_Moderators

What you've described does get noticed by the moderators. If it's really
just drive by support requests then that user's account can be placed on
moderation watch. That way the user's posts wont be seen until a moderator
releases them. That also gives the moderators a chance to do the shoulder
tap thing as well.

Thanks,




On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 12:54 AM, Morgan Estes <morgan.estes at gmail.com>wrote:

> I posted this as an idea for the WordPress.org forums and Mila suggested
> mailing the list with my issue. Here's the original posting:
>
> I recently came across a user who appears to have made it his goal to open
> a drive-by support request on every plugin in the WordPress.org repository.
> Most of the one-line "problems" I would classify as trollish, especially
> since he often doesn't respond, or his questions are already answered by
> reading the readme.txt.
>
> Long story short, I'd love to be able to mark certain users like this one
> as troublesome and, if there are enough valid reports, ban that person for
> a time (maybe they could be rehabilitated?)
>
> ---
> I don't go looking for stuff like this, but this user came to my attention
> after opening a support issue on one of my plugins. I patiently replied and
> marked it as not a support request, but noticed that this is a pattern of
> his (over 200 threads). It's not exactly trolling, but it's the kind of
> behavior that can easily drive folks away from the site.
>
> So really my question here is: am I just being too sensitive about this, or
> is there something that can (or should, even) be done?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Morgan W. Estes
> @morganestes
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