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In cases where we can't be sure the person displaying anti-social behaviour is a troll, but their behaviour is such that it is disrupting the the board to a significant extent - flying in the face of board policy, refusing to engage in anything like rational debate, being highly offensive - it seems to me that the wisest course of action is to treat them like a troll. Okay, so Hawkmoor *might* not get off on attention, but surely we have to err to the side of caution and not take the risk?
I think I see where the issue is. Essentially, I would see trolling and doing what Hawksmoor was doing as two different things. Both of these things are unacceptable, and both of these things need to be dealt with, but they are not the same thing. If Hawksmoor had been rude, graceless and unpleasant to people who commented on his writing, but restricted that behaviour to the Creation, he eventually either would have been mocked out of Barbelith or have given up on posting his work, or everyone else would have given up on commenting on his work - see Ten's photography thread elsewhere.
His offence, specifically, was his use of homophobic abuse, both within the thread and in his PMs. It was explained to him repeatedly that this was not acceptable, but he chose to continue to use it. Therefore, he was banned. This was unrelated to trolling as defined in this discussion, I think. He was not attacking an Internet community from inside, he was attacking people within the community with the only tools he had available to him - homophobic abuse and a kind of racial judo - because he needed those specific members to stop undermining his shaky self-worth and had a limited number of approaches to take to try to achieve that.
My point is that there are things that get you banned that are not trolling, and for that matter that trolling does not necessarily get you banned. Part of the reason for this is intent - if you are depending on analysis of intent to make your decisions, then those decisions may be forestalled pretty much permanently. Hawksmoor's intention may have been trollish - I don't believe it was, others do. His actions, however - making sustained efforts to make Barbelith less friendly for general (gay) and specific (those PMed with abuse) people - are, whether identified as trollish or identified as a comment feature of much trolling, unwanted. |
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