Thursday
Dec232010
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill In which I ban a commenter
Dec 23, 2010 Blogs I can't recall ever banning a commenter before, but Macsporan just stepped over the limit.
There has to be a first time for everything I suppose.
Reader Comments (92)
I've had to snip four or five of macsporan's comments entirely in the last two days and removed another three or four today. When he produced a comment which was simply crass and insulting too he stepped over the line. This was trolling pure and simple.
I can handle disagreement - as ZDB knows. But there must be a spirit of engagement otherwise we end up with a food fight.
I'm happy to accept the Bishop's wisdom on this and, at the same time, commend the comments above by Simon Hopkinson on 23 Dec at 11.52pm and 24 Dec at 12.15am, Political junkie on 24 Dec at 2.43am, and especially Jiminy Cricket at 2.51am. What a great analogy Jiminy!
Having been naively drawn into the argument with Bluecloud on the Tip Jar thread I can appreciate how much more annoying it must be for the Bish to have visitors trying to trash his property.
Thanks again Bish for all your work!
Why not have a dedicated thread called.
Off topic, Moved and Rude
anything beyond the pale (maybe with snipping for rude and crude.)..
just copy there, with a link to the article, and a note that it has been moved, off topic...
Then CaCC trolls can play until they are bored...
And they cannot claim censorship..
Skeptic Alerts. from the Campaign Against Climate Change...
Looks like Bishop Hill, is more 'dangerous' to the 'cause' than Delingpole!
--------------------------------
Climate Change sceptic blog alerts
Thursday, 23 December, 2010 15:13
From: "Campaign against Climate Change aggregator" <xxxxcampaigncc.org>
Add sender to Contacts
To: xxxxxxxxxxx.com
Climate Change sceptic blog alerts
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
•Bishop Hill: Iain Stewart and the MWP
•Bishop Hill: BBC FOIs Met
•Bishop Hill: Acton and UEA in the pillory
•Bishop Hill: Climate skeptic shop
As a guest in the good Bishops house his word is law, as would be expected in our own abode. It is a commendation to the nature of our host that this is the first commentator to receive a ban since inception of the blog,
Merry Christmas to all.
@ Jiminy Cricket
I wish we have a few more "positive minded" AGW proponents walking in
Do you know, I have never acually encountered one? I really haven't. The only argument they have is the insult and the appeal to discredited authority. If you take those away they have nothing.
You might just as well wish for a vegetarian crocodile.
Bishop
I think you have done the correct thing. I am very surprised that you have let ZDB carry on for as long you have.
Jack
Let's just say ZDB needs to be careful.
Fully agree with Beaverbrook. As far as I'm concerned, ban whom you like, bless whom you like. Life is way too short to second guess a UK host with such a formidable track record in fomenting real, highly intelligent debate.
Thanks for clarifying that you actually had to moderate him BH. I totally agree he was trolling, pure and simple and no doubt that is exactly what Monbiot and his sad crowd set up CACC for. Seems to me that that the plan is backfiring
Hi Bish happy Christmas to you, your family and all your readers (inc. trolls).
As for the ban your blog, your rules.
I like Barry Wood's idea (Dec 24, 2010 at 8:27 AM) - move dodgy comments into a special XXX, Adults Only thread.
Agreed.
I suggest, that rather than banning Macsporan, you instigate a "sin bin" and send her/him to it for a specified period of time.
Then, let him/her out in parole, on probation expecting better behaviour.
The first sending to the sin bin could be for a week or a month, depending on the severity of the crime.
Repeat offences would elicit longer periods of soliture, eventually extending up to a decade or more in extreme cases.
But banning, never.
One of the reasons for visiting sites such as Bishop Hill is to read contary views expressed and argued out.
Reading both sides of the case makes it easier for a member of the public like myself to weigh the evidence pro and con.
The reason "official science" is getting such a caning is that, by and large, its proponents are not willing to stand and argue with those whom they disagree.
We must not fall into that same trap.
@Justice4Rinka
""I wish we have a few more "positive minded" AGW proponents walking in"
Do you know, I have never acually encountered one? I really haven't. The only argument they have is the insult and the appeal to discredited authority. If you take those away they have nothing.
You might just as well wish for a vegetarian crocodile."
You may find them at Climate Audit and Lucia's. Judith Currey's as well. They tend to be deeply involved in the modeling and maths. The bases seem to involve the grasping, or attempts to grasp very complex processes. Supposing that no-one to date has definitively comprehended the myriad forces and reactions at work, there seems plenty of space for intelligent debate.
But, alas, it tends toward the highly technical. Lacking the math or statistical chops to follow those discussions as closely as I'd like, I even so do not suspect sophistry.
we seemed to be more addressed here to the integrity of the advocacy, less the science behind it.
I like the sin bin idea...we could go there and bait the troll whilst keeping the subject thread 'civilised'
Bit like the coliseum in ancint Rome.... :-)
On the other hand, we have situations where there is a deluge of absolute rubbish coming from persons whose aim is to snow the site with unreadable and childish clutter. No many how times their statements are rebutted, they come back with the same claims over and over again.
The plan is to make the blog unreadable, and generally they succeed in their mission. Piers Ackerman, Janet Albrechtson are two in Australia who are being trashed. Andrew Bolt has been targeted, and so has Miranda Devine.
Either the blog author takes control of their work, and repels the invasion, or the site becomes unreadable. Is that what you want?
To the Bish, thanks for the additional clarification above. Clearly there were items posted by Macsporan which were not allowed through, so the posted ones we can see are not the bad ones. It sounds to me as though the decision was not made lightly, fair enough.
I do support the sin bin idea, although another possibility is to redirect the offender's post to a permanent "sin bin" thread. That way it does not upset the continuity of the thread that the offending comments were aimed at, whilst heading off the claim of censorship to some extent. We can all have a look at the sin bin occasionally (if only for a laugh) and if the quality of posts from the "sinner" improves, perhaps they can be put back on probation and allowed to post normally again.
Then again its a lot of trouble to go to to deal with a puerile and ignorant poster who sounds like a stuck record. The pub landlord metaphor from Jiminy Cricket is rather a good one: you're barred (in suitable Peggy Mitchell voice, maybe)!
Merry Christmas everybody.
just moving it to a special thread would not allow them to claim censorship...
@j. ferguson 12:10,
Unfortunately I can't share your confidence in the 'technical' posters on many of the other blogs you mentioned. In many cases they simply erect multiple straw man arguments and force the discussion towards them, nit-picking furiously. Remember that the consensus is 'right', so the intent is to allow only the party line.
I also find that the 'academic' view that everyone is a participant in a sophomoric debate to be fairly tedious - the constant 'I want proof of that, quote a peer reviewed paper' etc etc. I find that blogs that model more on the concept of free rangin discussion much more pleasant.
@Chuckles
I don't disagree that a lot of the "debates" are unsubstantiated challenges to what appear to be well-developed analyses/critiques of prior publications. But....
Didn't you find the Bender dialogs at CA informative, for example?
It may be my over-developed sceptic nerve, but I keep hoping that a really sharp AGW believer will so exhaustively and effectively challenge a skeptical paper that the paper's survival as a well-qualified statement will then be publicly accepted by the "true believers." But then, this hope is likely nuts.
I might add that I have a great deal of trouble with the word "proof" in connection with Climate Science.
Now that the evidence is in, my faith in the Bishop's decision in reaffirmed. I liked Jiminy Cricket's analogy of a pub. The Bishop is a publican and as such has the right to refuse drunken trolls service.
Time to move one to a New Year. It is a pity that this had to happen at this time, but trolls have never been known for reasonable behavior.
It's your pub Bishop and you may bar whom you like. You don't need to explain the rules either, grownups should know how to behave.
@ Chuckles
Referencing the right sources has its uses ;-)
I can only blame myself for not producing this one in response to macsporan's witless assertion that Hockey Stick has 'never bee disproved'. Not even Briffa agreed with Mann about the handle of the stick, and he admits that the MWP was as warm as the present:
http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=136&filename=938018124.txt
Pure troll-poison.
Merry Christmas one and all.
One more vote against banning. Abusive posters should be <snipped> where necessary, but otherwise left so that their abuses are obvious to all. The biased censorship on RealClimate is one of the many things undercut their credibility. Sceptics should know better.
yeah, the first one hurts, but it is your place and you decide when the line is crossed. I have been fortunate. In the 5 years operating (and with a much smaller audience) I recall banning 5 or less.
The majority of folks are quite mature, if not occasionally heated.
I've been reading the above comments during the day, in between clearing up the 7 inches of snow caused by global warming off my drive and car. There are lots of really good suggestions and to be honest I do not have an answer to the Bishop's dilemma.
Just out of interest I went to my New Shorter Oxford Dictionary for a definition of "troll" and found the following: "a member of a race of grotesque dwarfs usually dwelling in caves or under bridges"
CAGW alarmists have for years been saying that we will have to reverse our present way of living and live in caves.
I ain't gonna live in any cave with a grotesque dwarf.
As for our resident trolls, those of grotesque mind, surely it must be from fear of this extraordinary blog hosted by his grace, that these slime balls (I was going to use the word people in referring to them but didn't want to equate them with real people) block up the threads so much. It is therefore a credit to the Bishop and all of his contributors that the alarmists feel that they have to spend so much of their time interfering and disrupting with the intelligent debates which we read here.
Peter Walsh
From 1984 to 86, I ran a BBS in Washington DC which evolved into a place to discuss technical issues in a "discipline" of more than idle interest in that location. Users built up to about 60 over the first few months and although there was a bit of turnover, the number and the "hits" seemed stable.
The nature of the discussions required a certain amount of vagueness to avoid compromising agreements some of the participants had with their day-jobs. They were fascinating even to an outsider.
One day, one of the most interesting users included a long rant which was especially political and with which I had no agreement, or even sympathy. I let it go and no-one else said anything. A month or two later, he did it again. This time i suggested that it might be better that these sorts of rants not be found on my BBS.
He immediately asked that I erase everything he'd ever posted and that he was outa there. I did what he asked and then lost about half of the remaining users who I discovered were of similar mind. What a surprise.
But the problem we see here with the trolls is that they seem not to contribute anything at all other than to make us aware how very shallow their understandings are. But then we have our shallow sceptics too.
So I continue to support the blacklisting of thoughtless AND obnoxious tele-thugs from this wonderful pub.
Just want to wish everyone here a good christmas and all the very best for the new year. Even ZDB, Macsporan and Bluecloud.
Jack
Hi Bish just a thought you could go back to anyone who makes an unacceptable comment and offer to carry the post as long as they give you permission to give their real name and e-mail address with the post.
Hi Bish just a thought you could go back to anyone who makes an unacceptable comment and offer to carry the post as long as they give you permission to give their real name and e-mail address with the post.
Peter whale - I'm presently enjoying a 105 degrees overproof whisky (52.5%). Am I seeing double or are you becoming repetitive?
Happy Christmas everyone, and thanks for increasing my meagre understanding of this complex subject. I hope that I'm still able to afford the broadband sub at this time next year after Huhne's green taxes have sliced a bit more off my fixed income.
I have just had a sudden thought. If this is now defined as a pub, perhaps I had better get permission from the spouse to attend in future. At least it's not far to walk home at the end of an evening...
Finally worked it out - the Bish is Al Murray ...
ThinkingScientist
I have just had a sudden thought. If this is now defined as a pub, perhaps I had better get permission from the spouse to attend in future. At least it's not far to walk home at the end of an evening..
ePub. I tried iPub, but Apple sued me. :)
""Don't feed the troll" - simply doesn't work. Someone or the other will respond - it is but natural."
Yes, it does work. No, it is not natural. It is childish. This is a place for adults. If you are not up to the burden of being an adult, you should not be here, or anywhere else where responsible grown-ups want to discuss important issues.
Personally, if it was my forum, I would ban trolls and troll-feeders in equal degree.
Don't he or she is nuisance but we don't have to connect with it.
I have to admit that I like the idea of moving trolls and serial abusers to to their own area marked as a sin bin. Means we don't have to wade through their mental excreta, whilst not banning them.
The problem of offensive posters is eternal.
There are no perfect solutions.
My personal view from being a blog denizen for some time is that banning/censoring/moderating should be used as little as possible, if one wants a dynamic blog.
As a user of blogs, my one rule is to follow the host's rules if I want to be an active community member.
I treat a blog as a cocktail party, where I am a guest.
A good host does not interfere with many conversations at his party, but a good guest does not tick off the host.
I can understand people saying"don't feed the trolls" but there is a problem with that.
I am sure that every day blogs like this one get new visitors who may have stumbled on a sceptical site for the first time or who are just starting to test the water of scepticism. If they see frequent questions from a warmist point of view going unanswered it may look like it's because we don't have answers. They won't know that the troll is a pain whose questions have been answered a million times before. It may look like the trolls have valid questions (which the visitor may well have seen raised by people like Monbiot etc) and if we look like we have no valid response beyond "don't feed the trolls" we could lose the uncommitted visitor.
I'm not saying that there is an easy answer but we ignore potential new sceptics at our peril.
Yes, ignoring already-answered questions is bad. Either re-answer them or provide a link to a previous answer. Having a FAQ list might make this easier.