Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Digital Pianos - Electronic Pianos - Synths & Keyboards "Weaponizing" Off-Topic posts in large threads

I suggest you spend some more time before you judge what the forum is and is not.
I think the banning of one of our most prized contributors at the behest of your "helpful" ways has raised resentment all around. More than you can know.

dmd has been around long enough for me to respect his opinion. Not so for yours.

+1!

C’mon folks CG is a big boy and I’m sure he can handle the time away. Like I said he may have inadvertently had me banned by reporting me a few months back. He knows how it works and the new poster here had every right to report something he felt was against forum rules. Everyone handles things differently. I’m attacked nearly every day on these boards because I hold to my opinions. I try to take it all in stride and try to diffuse the situation sometimes with humor sometimes a little more to the point, but I self police. I never report anyone but understand if other people do. It would be hypocritical to criticize some for reporting CG when it appears he has done it a few times himself. I think if people stopped taking things so personally there would be less friction all around.

+2!

Nobody has made a point to the contrary; you are attacking a straw man.




This point isn't actually all that important to me, but not all reportings are alike. Someone may be reported for really causing offense, whereas someone else may be reported for doing nothing wrong at all.

From my perspective the reporting of someone is not an issue. The issue lies in how the forum administrators (and ushers) act on receiving the reports.

What constitutes a real offense to you may differ from what me or another person thinks is offensive. Case in point I was called a zealot, inexperienced with digitals among other things and told not to post in a certain Pianoteq thread by CG. We all know CG’s disdain for Pianoteq and a few posters were complementing me on how I was trying to keep the conversation civil but the “attacks” continued. I had no idea there was an ongoing feud about Pianoteq. I eventually responded with my brand of humor and referred to David Korea’s and the Branch Davidians on how I was being treated. After that post I was banned for picking on CG because he found that post offensive. He regretted it later and said he was just having a bad day and misunderstood my humor. Best thing is to just avoid taking things personally.

Thanks for sharing your viewpoint. Resent away.

Well, we now have an issue developing here ….

From my perspective, it appears someone reported something and management agreed that the post was OT and banned the poster.

Now, we do not know precisely why he was banned. It may have been that single post or it may have been a history of antagonisms that management was dealing with and decided enough was enough.

I did not read any of the "offending" posts (from CG) so I cannot judge the merits of that decision by management.

What I do know is that this is the method put in place by PW management to control these issues.

If you have a better method I am sure they would entertain your ideas.

To blame the reporter is to put a "chilling" effect on "reporters" and could result in no further reporting which could result in unchecked bullying and senseless OT posting that annoys us all.

Yes, someone was banned. That someone was well-liked and respected on this forum.

But that does not give him (or anyone) license to break the rules of the forum.

He was reported, tried (by management), and sentenced.

That is how our system works. We move on.

As far as I know, reporting here is anonymous (only the mods know who reported a post/user, unless the mods themselves divulge the reporter), so I don't think there's as much of a chilling effect. In this case, it was fairly obvious who reported CG (and the reporter self-identified here) so exactly how anonymous it is, is certainly up for question. But I'm assuming if you had an issue with someone and wanted to report it as a good samaritan, there's no obvious reason anyone would know it was you unless you made it plain by your own public behavior.

Btw dmd, I agree with just about everything you've said here. Thanks for providing a valuable counterpoint.

Thank You, your support is appreciated.

I have been doing a lot of posting on this topic and much of it has been in support of "reporting" violations of the forum rules and regulations.

I do support that.

However, to provide some balance to my view ….

Let me also say that I have never reported an OT post.

I guess I have never view anything which I thought was egregious enough of a violation to "report".

Someone else might view it in a light that they feel the need to report it.

It is still left up to management to judge and punish if they see fit. If they do, I assume it was warranted in some manner.

What I have done is asked posters who seem to be moving OT in a thread that I started to please move their conversation to their own thread and to their credit they did just that without another comment.

Perfect ! That is how it should go.

And I think, for the most part, that is how it will go if an OP asks a poster to do that.

What I have reported is posts which I think are blatant attempts to advance a "business" (their business) within this section of PW.

I do not wish to encounter "ADS" here and there so I report them.

I am not sure if I had anything to do with it …. but we do not seem to have much of that.

That is a good thing.

I have reported only messages that were clearly SPAM. I particularly hate that kind of abuse; they are rare (luckily).

About OT, to be honest it bothers me the amount of OT in this forum. Some time ago a person posted some subject and it did not take too long for the thread to completely derail (I do not remember the OP and topic FTM). But I vaguely remember that the OT derailed to another OT that derailed to another OT. One of the OTs was about programming languages. IIRC, half a dozen messages on topic and the rest, OT.

A few OT posts that do not derail the main topic are OK but more often than not the original topic gets lost in the middle of so much garbage. It is a pity as one has no incentive to add any new information pertaining to the original topic because it will also be lost in the middle of the garbage.

Normaly I stop following these threads because the OT messages are TL;DR and that is probably the reason why I never noticed a deliberate trend by anyone to forcing the derailment (as mentioned above) or the attrictions implied.

It would be better to open a new topic with an OT prefix (as suggested by the rules) as a follow-up. It would also more respectful to the OP, IMO.

Back here

Let me clarify. Karma is a b**ch I’ve reported other people twice on the forum indeed. First was slobajudge who insulted and attacked me and other people. I know for sure I wasn’t the only one who reported him back then. I was the only one who admitted it though. He was banned for some time and I’m not sorry about that.

Then more recently it was Jethro. It’s debatable who attacked who, who started it, who defended his position in a rather religious way but as I said it may have been a language thing and by a coincidence I was anonymously bullied on YouTube by multiple accounts on the same day and I thought it was Jethro. I decided to report him and leave it to moderators to judge wisely. Well, looking in a retrospective now after I’ve been (IMO) unfairly banned, I think it was too much for him to be banned, I may have overreacted and moderators may have just acted unnecessarily harsh against him. I was sorry and I apologized to him later.

Now to my ban after that Nord Grand thread thing. Let me get this straight. I haven’t had the intention to troll or cause troubles! It was about a guy asking whether Nord Grand is suitable for learning piano and I actually was among the first to recommend it. The guy ordered a Nord Grand and since the original question was rather answered and it was suggested that he should download the user manual while waiting, I decided to tell a similar story about my father and his Soviet car. I chose wrong intro though. In the context of some recent humorous discussions where the word “derail” was kind of the regular jargon I started along the lines of “since this thread is already finished, let’s derail it”. I guess it was a very bad choice of words and I’m sorry about that now but it’s ridiculous to think my intention was to troll or denigrate. It wasn’t even a complete offtopic since the moral of the story was that reading the manual while waiting for delivery is beneficial. In a follow up reply I told a story about my grandfather who defected communist Bulgaria for the US.

So, the dude reported me and the moderator edited my posts removing the content and stating that I should consider it a warning. And I thought “oops, I may have crossed the line, I should stop”. And I stopped and went to bed. Well, in the morning I realized the moderator reconsidered and decided to not just warn me but ban me. I mean, why? I rarely post offtopic here. Maybe 1% of my posts are OT but I rarely go into multiple offtopic and even the one I sometimes post is still somehow related to the discussion and is some innocent talk about Bulgaria, my family, traditions, Bulgarian sayings...

I couldn’t even discuss with moderators, apologize, promise not to dii on that again. I was just told that “if you don’t like the rules don’t come back”. Well guess what, I thought that was unfair. I’ve contributed a lot for the past 12 years and I think I have helped many people. I may have my fair share of Pianoteq criticism and heated debates but I consider my participation here rather civilized and helpful to the forum. I couldn’t even reply to PM-s that I received. That all left bitter taste. What I know for sure is I will never report anyone anymore, regardless. I think moderators lack the resource, time and context to judge wisely, so I would rather avoid relying on their judgment. Lessons learned everyday

Apologies to the forum for causing disturbance with my behavior.

Let’s move on. Peace

+1! Welcome back.

Yes, welcome back!

Great to have you back CG!

No fair it’s too soon!

Welcome back bro!

”Apologies to the forum for causing disturbance with my behavior.

Let’s move on. Peace“

Fair enough, and I agree. I am glad for you that it was not permanent. You are clearly a valued member here and despite whatever difference we had, I wouldn’t want a forum to lose a valued member over that level of a disagreement. Apparently I can expect some continued resentment by some, but that is life on the internet.

Take it easy.

+1

Welcome back, CG.