patrick.net

Some level of author-based moderation.
1. The ability to delete trolling posts. The one thing trolls hate is having their trolling deleted.
2. The ability to restrict posts to users who have been created at least three months ago and have a post history of at least five posts. This makes using alts a far greater pain in the ass.
3. The ability to create invited-only threads. This will allow for the most productive conversations. Just add a request invitation link on the thread post. Let authors whitelist users for the thread or for any thread by that author.

None of these would interfere with free speech as troll as welcome to open their own petty threads. It would, however, let people who want to engage in truly free speech to have a conversation without it being disrupted or derailed.

Excellent article on stopping trolls the Google+ way.

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2824753/how-to-control-trolls-with-google.html

Simply put, trolls (according to a recently published study from the University of Manitoba) are "everyday sadists" and "psychopaths" who get pleasure from the unhappiness of others. Some are "accidental trolls" -- and don't even know that they're trolls. Others are proud of the distinction and devote countless hours to honing their trolling skills and bragging to other trolls on dedicated message boards.

Trolling is the act of gratifying one's desire to see people suffer by the use of specially targeted comments on message boards or social networks under the cover of anonymity.

Trolls do real damage. Trolling (and spambot-generated spam) convinced Popular Science -- a publication devoted to open discourse about science -- to shut off comments for everybody.

Trolling is wrong. And you don't have to accept it. It's time to stop putting up with trolling and do something about it.

The good news for anyone who wants to be a public and influential person is that there are places to go where you can express yourself, have conversations and share your passions and still keep trolls in check. The best of these is Google+, in my opinion.

[O]n Google+, comments to a post are part of and subordinate to that post. When trolls comment on your post on Google+, you can delete the comment and block future comment.

After you block them, the troll will see nothing on your profile as long as they're logged in. If they log out, they can see your public posts -- Google+ posts are, after all, public pages on the open Internet. But they can't comment (i.e., troll you) without being logged in.

The troll can, of course, create a new account with a new fake name and come back to troll you. But because it takes some time and effort to create a new account, and they can be blocked with such little effort on your part, trolls almost never do this on Google+ for any length of time.

Blocking on Google+ is the opposite of blocking on Twitter. On Google+, the troll is gone forever. On Twitter, the troll continues to troll you without restraint. The only effect is that you have your head in the sand while the troll reaches all your followers.

On Google+, blocking someone makes that account vanish for you, and makes your posts and comments vanish for them. It's a very complete termination of interaction between you and the troll.

Dan8267 says

1. The ability to delete trolling posts. The one thing trolls hate is having their trolling deleted.

Why do you hate HEY YOU?
ROFLMAO.

I do love suggestions!

Need to finish making the site able to escape shutdown notices, then I'll start dealing with these.

I'm using packer.io to generate vm's that I will be able to deploy to any cloud provider quickly to move the site. Haven't quite got it working, but soon. Is there a better way to make the site instantly portable to another ISP?

It would be nice if every post had some link that scrolls to the top or maybe the menu button was always visible when scrolled. Right now on mobile device it takes a really long time to get out of the thread into the forum if the thread is really long.

1. Eliminate Ignore. No one is forced to read any thread or comment.
I can see some leaving patnet, POUTING.
2. List the names of those that "Dislike".

BTW,
Stop APO from using such vulgar language.
I'm PISSED OFF & FUCKING tired of the SHIT EATING ASSHOLES using such language
on such a civil site. Anyone that doesn't like these brilliant ideas,FUCK YOU in the ASS!

Intelligence is not a requirement to practice FREE SPEECH, GOT IT CUMWADS?

FortWayne says

It would be nice if every post had some link that scrolls to the top or maybe the menu button was always visible when scrolled. Right now on mobile device it takes a really long time to get out of the thread into the forum if the thread is really long.

@FortWayne OK, how about the up and down arrows after the comment numbers, with the big "P" between them going to the home page?

Too close together and hard to click on a phone? Too ugly?

Overrun Patnet with flaming liberals. Everything goes better with flaming liberals.

rando says

Need to finish making the site able to escape shutdown notices,

I don't see how your approach is going to help you achieve this. The fundamental problem is that as an American citizen living in America, the U.S. government can easily force you to comply with its wishes. They order you to take down some content. If you don't comply, they seize your assets and throw you into a cage. How are you able to resist the latter even if you manage to make some of your assets out of the reach of government?

Those who resist the U.S. government's order do so by having the protection of another government. In the case of Wikileaks, that's the Swedish government and a few others. Julian Assange is protected by the government of Ecuador and is living in their embassy in the U.K. Without the protection of those governments, Wikileaks would be shut down in a day and Assange arrested and imprisioned with either no trial or a shame trial.

When you receive a DMCA takedown notice, a corporation initiates the action, but the action is ultimately carried out by the U.S. government. As long as you are living in the U.S., it can use violence and the threat of violence to force you to comply. To run a truly free online community, you would have to physically reside in a country that supported and protected your freedom. Unfortunately, the U.S. is far from such a country. It pays lip service to freedom and democracy, but its actions unequivocally demonstrates utter intolerance for these things. The people who run the government are interested in wealth and power, not liberty. They tolerate the people having liberties that increase their own wealth and power, but not those that threaten it.

[continue]

For example, you are free to invent things and to buy lots of different products, because that enriches the ruling class. You are free to talk about most issues, because that increases ad revenues. You are not free to take video of animal cruelty in farms, because that may motivate the people to demand regulations on animal suffering that would cost farm owners money in the form of either expenses or decrease revenues. So that liberty is not tolerate and laws are passed against it.

HEY YOU says

1. Eliminate Ignore. No one is forced to read any thread or comment.

Replace ignore with "ban from my threads". No one cares about comments being hidden. They just don't want their threads disrupted. Disrupting someone else's conversation is not free speech. Having a conversation with others that cannot be disrupted by trolls is free speech.

Free speech is the freedom to engage in conversations with willing participants, not to force others to listen to your voice while drowning out theirs. Trolls are the equivalent of the protesters who shout "not my president" and "he will not divide us" over other people.

rando says

@FortWayne OK, how about the up and down arrows after the comment numbers, with the big "P" between them going to the home page?

Too close together and hard to click on a phone? Too ugly?

Thanks Patrick. Whatever works, I'm not picky when it comes to looks. :)

Dan8267 says

I don't see how your approach is going to help you achieve this. The fundamental problem is that as an American citizen living in America, the U.S. government can easily force you to comply with its wishes.

For now, I just want the ability to easily clone the site somewhere else, so a fully functional copy is up within one hour.

But long term, I think there's a technical solution to censorship of any one website. The site just has to be distributed, kind of holographic so that each piece has a significant part of the whole thing, maybe not all of it, but enough to be effective.

Currently studying bittorrent and bitcoin to see how those things escape shutdown. Trying to apply what I learn to the latest browser features like localstorage, so that every browser on the internet could have a fragment of the forum. It wouldn't really be patrick.net anymore, but that's OK. It would still be something really good to do. And it's fun to think that ordinary people like you and me have this power to escape the big cat by creating an infinite number of mouseholes to hide in.

Actually, I didn't vote for Trump. I was Bernie or Bust, and supported Jill Stein after the super delegates nominated Hillary. You can tell this from my classic thread, Why you should vote for someone who will lose this election.

Dan8267 says

Disrupting someone else's conversation is not free speech.

WTF!
A comment is not an insurrection of a physical attack on the OP or those that comment.
It's words.
Please don't offend my tender sensibilities.
I'M A SNOWFLAKE.
I'll ignore you.
Free speech-saying something that I agree with.

It's not about offense. I have never taken offense from any troll as I simply do not respect them as human beings, nonetheless their opinions. It's about the ability to have a discussion or debate with other people and not have that discussion derailed with endless alts reposting bullshit. Conversations have flows. There is nothing you or any troll cannot say in your own threads. Hence, there is no censorship.

Furthermore, if you look at any of my threads, you'll see that not only do I welcome people challenging my positions, I demand they do that, attack the core of my position, rather than making straw men, ad hominems, poisoning the well, no true Scottsmen, and other faulty arguments that fail to attack my position.

Finally, calling someone a snowflake doesn't make them so. It's a poisoning the well argument and carries no weight.

Dan8267 says

Replace ignore with "ban from my threads".

Disagree with this.

Dan8267 says

You are arguing that trolling is necessary for conversation.

I'm arguing that you, Dan, should not be the arbiter of what constitutes trolling, not even on "your" threads. There is no need to turn the PatNet free speech zone into a collection of non-interacting free-speech "silos". It is counter to the very fundamentals of free speech, if you ask me. There should be the possibility of exchange of ideas, no matter how troll-y you may find them. The ignore functionality is good enough for me. Dan, you can feel free to recommend on your own threads who you deem should be ignored, but you should not be able to FORCE them to be ignored.

Dan8267 says

You are arguing that trolling is necessary for conversation.

Dan8267 says

It's not about offense. I have never taken offense from any troll as I simply do not respect them as human beings, nonetheless their opinions. It's about the ability to have a discussion or debate with other people and not have that discussion derailed with endless alts reposting bullshit. Conversations have flows. There is nothing you or any troll cannot say in your own threads. Hence, there is no censorship.

Furthermore, if you look at any of my threads, you'll see that not only do I welcome people challenging my positions, I demand they do that, attack the core of my position, rather than making straw men, ad hominems, poisoning the well, no true Scottsmen, and other faulty arguments that fail to attack my position.

Finally, calling someone a snowflake doesn't make them so. It's a poisoning the well argument and carries no weight.

I understand the points you are trying make.
I know that many on here are forced to read comments,they disagree with,on their threads
& have to respond to comments on their threads,Patnet rule # 11.
Ignoring something doesn't require a click.
HEY YOU has clicked zero "Ignores"
Notice I used "I" 3 times in my comment.
If I say SNOWFLAKES or any other name doesn't mean someone is.
Old sayings:Hit dog hollers. If the shoe fits wear it. etc.

People just look for a reason to be offended.
I'm ignoring those that disagree with me & taking my threads,going home & "you" can't play.

Anyone can post comments on my threads.
If they open themselves to personal attacks for hypocrisy based on a pretzel logic value system,
I'm more than glad to point it out.
They are welcome to be ASSHOLES!

Ignoring is not censorship?
Of course it's not! Those that"ignore" said so.

" It's a poisoning the well.."
WELL! Let's limit access to the well.

justme says

I'm arguing that you, Dan, should not be the arbiter of what constitutes trolling, not even on "your" threads.

Ah, but the points you are making don't hold water.

1. There is no need to turn the PatNet free speech zone into a collection of non-interacting free-speech "silos".

Stopping trolls from disrupting does not turn a forum into non-interacting silos. The fact is a person either chooses to engage with the troll or chooses not to. If the person chooses to engage the toll then he won't ban the troll or will engage in third-person threads. If the person chooses not to engage the troll then already the very isolation you are opposing has been actualized.

2. It is counter to the very fundamentals of free speech

No, discouraging people from starting threads would be counter to the very fundamentals of free speech, and trolling does this very thing. A lot of people simply decide that it's not worth their time to write on a forum were trolls run rampant. By allowing trolling, you are actually decreasing the amount of free discussion between people with opposing ideas.

3. There should be the possibility of exchange of ideas, no matter how troll-y you may find them.

A user preventing a troll from posting on this thread does NOTHING to prevent the possibility of the exchange of ideas between any two persons, even the user and the troll. Each can still broadcast their ideas uninterrupted on their own threads. Each can still read the other persons threads while not logged in. Your assertion is empirically false. This very website's history disproves it.

[stupid comment limit]

rando says

I do love suggestions!

Need to finish making the site able to escape shutdown notices, then I'll start dealing with these.

I'm using packer.io to generate vm's that I will be able to deploy to any cloud provider quickly to move the site. Haven't quite got it working, but soon. Is there a better way to make the site instantly portable to another ISP?

Patrick, I will say your response time is incredibly good. I attribute that to the simplicity of the site and lack of overhead.

4. The ignore functionality is good enough for me.

The ignore function already bans trolls from a user's threads. What I'm proposing is less restrictive than the ignore function. It would allow both users to see each other's posts even while logged in. The only thing I'm adding is a mechanism that circumvents the effectiveness of using alts to force yourself into someone else's conversation so as to disrupt it.

The only thing accepting trolls does is encourage people who want to participate in honest debate and discussion of controversial issues not to.

HEY YOU says

Ignoring something doesn't require a click.

I don't want to ignore trolls. I want to keep them out of conversations that would be productive and enlightening otherwise. Many times two or more people with good intentions are discussing a controversial issue. That conversation immediately stops when a troll barges in. Ignoring the troll doesn't work. Banning him and deleting any comments made by him with an alt does work. It works damn well because trolls hate it when their comments are deleted. It makes them completely impotent.

Freedom of speech means the freedom to communicate with consenting audiences, not the freedom to force your voice onto others or to prevent others from being heard.

Thanks for the link to home and the arrows Patrick. Makes it much easier on mobile.

I have a question: When quoting from linked articles is there a way to make the quoted text a different shade or color? I have to put quotations around all quoted text or else it is unclear whether it is the OP writing it or coming from the article, so then the quoted text mixes with the OP's text and it can get confusing. The other part of this is when I link to an article, text from the article never automatically appears in the post, like it used to.

Doesn't sound to hard to make text quoted from articles to show up in a different color. But then when you quote that in a comment, you want the color to remain, right?

If you post an article link with no other text, the site should still attempt to auto-quote it. Some sites are resistant to quoting though, maybe because of a paywall or some such.

Maybe I should try to auto-quote if the link is alone on a line, rather than entirely alone in the post or comment. Yes, that sounds better.

Thanks for the suggestions, these things are on the list and I should get to them soon, since I have made a lot of progress on making the site portable to other cloud providers in case Digital Ocean threatens shutdown again.

Yea Piggys entire purpose here is to derail conversation by polluting threads with stupid images and personal attacks. The majority of his posts are personal attacks.

But he's achieved his goal of getting everyone to hate him. It's what self-loathing losers are all about

Would banning personal attacks restrict free speech?

errc says

Would banning personal attacks restrict free speech?

Personal attacks don't have to be banned. Under my proposal they can still be made, but thread authors can keep them and other trolling out of their own threads so as to keep conversations from being hijacked.

rando says

the site should still attempt to auto-quote it

I don't find auto-quoting to be very useful. The first paragraph of an article isn't always the best summary of it, or the best quote for an original post. An intentional selection of text by the author of the OP is going to produce must better results than any mechanical selection of text. Same for YouTube videos.

Dan8267 says

I want to keep them out of conversations that would be productive and enlightening otherwise.

Now this is in FUN!
What makes you think you are productive & enlightened or that any patnetter
could contribute anything positive?

Patrick, the up/down arrows (top of page/bottom of page)... having it next to every single screen name takes away for the screen name focus and is redundant. If you want to include one of those links at every post, please put it off to the side in the right hand margin. Seems like that would make more sense given that you scroll from the right hand margin?

However, I don't think you need more than two of those links (one at the top and one at the bottom).

thanks @BayArea yes i will do that

ok, done

HEY YOU says

What makes you think you are productive & enlightened or that any patnetter

Honey, each author would be the arbitrary of what constitutes trolling. Authors who reject participants for other reasons will simply have less popular threats. Same for authors who accept trolls. Let the market forces determine success. Do you hate free markets?

Looks like Ironman has been very successful in his trolling :)