No, not the Monty Python type. 🙂
Been thinking about this as the General Forum currently has two spammers.
Spammer A bothers me a lot, Spammer B doesn't bother me at all.
So I'm examining my own reactions. Clearly the problem lies with my perceptions, rather than the posts themselves. Otherwise they'd both bother me, or neither would bother me.
Seems I'm making assessments of the individual posters, and then reacting according to who posted rather than what was posted.
Do others react the same way to different spammers, or are we all doing what I seem to be doing?
The post that was quoted here has been removedSpam is in the eyes of the beholder, just like beauty --or the lack of it. There
is, however, an element of aggression in it, of power by means of imposing
on others something which the other considers intrusive, offensive, or plain
violent. And, in the purest Foucaultian tradition, wherever there is power
there is resistance. Henceforth, spam is determined not by the spam itself
but by the degree and extension of the resistance to it.
Spam is defined by wikipedia as follows: "Forum spam consists of posts on Internet forums that contains related or unrelated advertisements, links to malicious websites, and abusive or otherwise unwanted information."
I think its a basically accurate definition but it really ends up being up to the individual to define what spam is to them. It doesn't take very long to figure out who posts things that are not worth reading, and it also doesn't take much to just skip them and move on to things that are more interesting. What is considered to be "spam" by one person may be seen as acceptable "humor" by others.
If you think something is spam, then ignore it and move on to what you're interested in.
If you like the post, then read on and enjoy it.
It is a waste of your time if you are trying to be a self-appointed forum sheriff. 🙂
Spammer A and Spammer B weren't intended to be particular people, I'm not being roundabout here. I'm actually thinking about several regular posters. A and B represent extremes of my different personal reactions to different posters. Anyone can spam if they wish, nobody (including me) has to read if they don't want to.
I'll have to read up on Seitse's halo effect. I know nothing about psychology.
Originally posted by mwmillerExcellent comments. Also, 1) Our perceptions of other people are conditioned and/or informed by the frequency and proximity of our contact with them. Have they been conditioned/informed from afar in an online public forum through the lens of its prevailing standards of civility or privately via personal messages or emails or telephone calls or Skype or by having actually been in their presence offline? 2) "Beauty" is less a matter of being in the subjective eyes of the beholder than in the actual mind's eye of the beheld, i.e. that which makes an.individual unique and worth knowing. 3) If the pygmies who each perceived the elephant differently because of their various vantage points circumferentially from trunk to tail were here today, each would probably reply to the objective questions raised by Kewpie's original post in a different way. 4) In summary, as a well known author [may have been John Locke] once observed: "We arrive at the truth through the honest disagreement among friends." Adversarial attitudes and personal attack mode breed dysfunction and spam..
Spam is defined by wikipedia as follows: "Forum spam consists of posts on Internet forums that contains related or unrelated advertisements, links to malicious websites, and abusive or otherwise unwanted information."
I think its a basically accurate definition but it really ends up being up to the individual to define what spam is to them. It doesn't tak ...[text shortened]... ead on and enjoy it.
Just don't waste your time trying to be a self-appointed forum sheriff. 🙂
I would guess that most regular forum readers, like myself, eventually develop mental filters. I very definitely look at who posted before reading a post. Some posters I ignore (-r, -w {= no read, no write}), others I read but don’t reply to (r, - w), still others I sometimes read and sometimes reply to (+/-r, +/-w).
My advice to anyone who ever feels upset by a post is: look inside yourself, find out what button the post pushed, and then disconnect that button.