This is a study of a lenr-forum post by Zeus46. Zeus46 is quite likely the user who has commented here as Zeus45. Both of them sometimes make useful comments. Both also show possible troll behavior. Zeus46 is the user who asked me a question on lenr-forum, which I answered straightforwardly in context (as other users noted), and for which answer I was first banned.
(Asking a straightforward question which has a clear answer that can be seen as uncivil is a classic trolling technique. I have seen master writers with high experience sucked into answering. In a sane community, with sane administration, it would not be a problem, but … communities do not always have sane administration. This happens on Quora.com.)
He continued to troll, me and others, with no clear response from lenr-forum moderation. I previously looked at this behavior on Trolling on lenr-forum.
Summary: Zeus46 is Zeus45 here, and most of his commentary is trolling, often through presenting a fact that has an obvious and very misleading interpretation. Sometimes the “fact” is blatantly false, and he would reasonably know it. Trolls, however, are not necessarily reasonable.
The following comments here claim to be written by “Zeus45” (using an anonymizing email address that cannot be used to contact the user directly):
1 trolling
2 opinion
3 opinion
4 alerted me to the 403 error for access of lenr-forum referred from CFC. Useful.
5 trolled (classic!).
However, there was a previous comment, using a different anonymous email address, and it was, in fact, the first comment this blog ever received, it was before I was intentionally banned on lenr-forum permanently:
11/21/16 at 3:18 PM
Author: Uchoads
Planet Lomax
Population: 1
From evidence I have previously mentioned, this was Zeus46, with high probability. And this is also Zeus 45 with even higher certainty. I could also develop more evidence if I cared to go to the effort, but I don’t. It’s not worth it. I’d know more if LENR-forum moderators want to share private information, but I absolutely do not expect that.
Now, to the LENR-forum post:
−1 (at this point, one downvote from Alan Coetmeur)
Some forum moderators or administrators (Alain is an administrator) have suggested that talking about a banned user, on lenr-forum, where the user cannot respond, is to be avoided. However, LF moderators not infrequently decry behavior and then do nothing about it, and some, then do the like of it themselves. Dewey Weaver described this as “amateur hour.”
ABD Watch
As the real Emperor Napoleon* would no doubt attest, it’s pretty damn boring being stuck on your own island.
Sure, it could be if I was “stuck.” First of all, I could post on lenr-forum any day, easily, either identifying myself or not. However, I don’t, quite precisely because I declared that until certain issues were addressed, I’d boycott the site. Why should I contribute content to a site that disrespects author rights? The ban there forced me to focus here, and what I discovered doing that is how much more useful I can be here than there. I am building content here, and many projects are possible here that were not possible there. “Boring” is not a description of my days. Sometimes I take on projects that involve work that some might consider “boring,” but my ontology is not particularly normal. I do these things knowing the benefits.
There is nobody else writing content here, yet, but plenty are reading it and comment on-blog or off. I interact with many LENR figures by email, directly.
So boring in fact, that to pass the time one can trawl through the many pages of the user list here, and tally up exactly who has been banned, in the process effectively christening yourself as “King of the Trolls”.
http://coldfusioncommunity.net/So who is banned on lenr-forum?/
How many pages is that? It would appear that Z did not look at how many would be involved. I did not go through all the pages (the full list is 74 pages). Instead, the member list is sorted in order of number of posts, and I only went down as far as more than 7 posts. That took looking down the list for less than 9 pages, scanning for the lock icon, which is very quick. It took much more time to write the post.
I assume that there are users who were banned with very few posts, but I did not look for them, and one consideration is that banning someone with a low level of contributions is relatively harmless, because, after all, they can just register a new account. Only someone with many contributions is likely to be seriously offended by a block. There are only two users currently banned where the ban is reasonably questionable, my own ban, perhaps, and that of H-G Branzell. Neither ban has been explained as far as I can tell.
“King of the trolls,” he made that up. Now, it’s a fact that what I write has often offended some. On one occasion I took an action (on en.Wikipedia) that I knew would provoke an administrator to act in such a way as to lose his tools. That context, however, was one where this administrator had been grossly abusive, for years, with nobody being able to do anything about it, he was popular. I merely called his bluff by doing something totally harmless but that challenged his right to dominate and control. I knew reasonably well what he would do, he’d threatened to do it. And so he did it, and all hell broke loose.
Some people become entirely too accustomed, for their own good, to getting their own way.
Other highlights include lengthy bleatings about the LENR-forum update, and the now standard lecturing of the moderators here for the gross impertinence of not “sharing power” with the community. (ie. not sharing power with him…)
“Bleatings” is obviously trolling. Now, are these “highlights”? I suppose a post is a “highlight,” but it is the normal way to present a thought on a blog. There is one such post:
There were many glitches and issues from the software update. Now, if I consider them in detail, is that “lengthy”? On lenr-forum, posts are limited in length.
As well, what is one post here might have been many on lenr-forum.
Here, I normally make a very brief introduction, and then the user may decide whether or not to read the rest. In fact, some of what I pointed out was fixed, whether or not my comments had anything to do with that. The 403 access error was fixed, after being again mentioned here. And I congratulated them on that.
As to lecturing moderators, people who are resistant to criticism will often interpret a detailed comment as a “lecture.” However, I am not pinning anyone down. I could be argued that what I wrote on LENR-forum was too long, lecturing, and moderators may believe that they have an obligation to read everything, though, clearly, they don’t. However, if it’s here, it is not a “lecture,” in the possibly offensive sense. Nobody is required to read it. Zeus reads it and then denigrates it. Typical troll.
Different people are looking for different kinds of writing. On some fora where the norm is quick bar conversation, snappy and often snippy, the clever repartee that is a mark of male dominance, thorough answers that anticipate concerns that may not yet have been expressed are often disliked, whereas on Quora.com, if someone is interested in the subject or point of view, long answers are actively appreciated. Brief answers are often collapsed, deprecated, even if completely correct! Perhaps that is why I have 2.6 million page views there. Not perhaps, it is more clear than that, because users tell me directly, and I have over a thousand followers there, many of whom I also follow, because they are excellent or useful writers.
The worst trolls will comment, on some fora, on a long post, quoting the entire post and then adding, at the end, tl;dr. If it was Too Long and they Didn’t Read it, why did they comment with quotation? I’ve seen that one for years. Why is it necessary to write tl;dr at all? Only if something was addressed personally, with an answer expected, does this become ordinary civil conversation, and politeness would be more like what Peter Gluck wrote (see below). Otherwise it is an attempt to insult the author. “You are not worth more than four letters and a semicolon.”
Skilled writers have long commented that to write briefly can take more work than to just write what comes to mind. I’ve been told by some whom I trust that yes, my writing on a topic is longer than theirs, but that this is because they spend three times as much time on it. Mark Twain, allegedly: “I would have written more briefly, but I didn’t have time.”
Also – An honourable mention to Peter Gluck, who despite his permanently brken keybord, still managed to type out the most polite “TL:DR” comment ever, underneath another distended instalment of swollen prose. (Actually two instalments, if you include the omnipresent biographical sign-off).
I wrote the biography intending it to be what users read when they look up my profile. To an anonymous troll, this is meaningless, and these users have nothing in their profile, or have hidden their profile. Then I changed the theme, I think is what happened, and the profile bio was now displayed with every post. But, of course, if one has read it once, it takes a fraction of a second to skip it. Again, trolls will look for anything to criticize, that they think might be offensive. Here, I will probably rewrite that profile to be brief, with a link to a longer bio. When I get around to it. This is hardly a big issue here.
As to Peter Gluck, yes, I have had three comments here purporting to be from Peter Gluck.
The first was probably spoofed. Peter has sometimes gone off the rails and has become insulting, but mostly not, and there is evidence that he did not do this here, and his two approved posts were indeed polite and considered constructive. (And even though it had his email address, he denied writing it, “of course!” And I believe him.) 1 2
Z is referring to the second, where Peter asks for an “executive summary.” It was already there, as the first paragraph, which I often do. I added a “more” tag to make this completely clear. Peter has long had a problem with long posts. However, this has long been my position: one may read a post at leisure. It is not the same as being face-to-face, where a long soliloquy can be quite rude. It takes much less time to read, for skilled readers, than to listen. One may skim and get the sense, and then read parts of interest more carefully. One can skip the whole thing. It is not uncommon that my friends suggest that I be more brief. When they offer editing services, that might actually happen. (Sometimes people write summaries for me.) Until then, I am usually brief in a post summary at the time, at the top, and in what is written for polemic effect. I put far, far more effort into my published peer-reviewed paper than any anything else I’ve written in the last few years. Funding requests will be brief! — with additional detail presented as hypertext.
* Abd, sorry if you inferred that planet-blomax.com was “rapidly becoming your St Helena” because I felt you would die there. It was more that only whilst on Elba was Napoleon still able to raise a rebel army, and afterwards reimpose his will over France.
I think he is lying, he is not sorry about anything. The trolling implication is that I have a goal to “impose my will over” others. It’s the opposite, my goal is to create and/or discover consensus. I work toward this every day.
Zeus45/46 is also lying about the balance here. In response to this, I refined the categories, giving “lenr-forum” a new subcategory, “lenr-forum admin.” As can be seen easily on the home page, under Categories, there are seven posts here about “lenr-forum admin.” There are another 18 posts categorized under “lenr-forum,” but those are simply about content there, not about administration. The most-used category is, of course, Rossi v. Darden. There are a total of 57 live posts to date here.
He is also lying about his identity. 5 “I am not “trolling” you, I think you are maybe oversensitive. I am not impersonating zeus46 either – thats why my name is diffrerent [sic].”
This is “lying” because it has a blatant deceptive intention. It is literally true, he is not “impersonating” zeus46, he is zeus46. I state that as a fact from multiple evidences, not because it is a total certainty, but I would estimate the probability of error in it at under one in a thousand. These things are unlikely to be pure coincidence, but I won’t detail them. See, I was a Wikimedia sysop, and detecting sock puppetry was part of the job, and I was also active defending users against possibly false charges. Plus I briefly poked the system as a trial, when I was blocked and had given up on due process, on en.Wikipedia (not elsewhere). I knew evasive techniques that I did not bother to use. My position was like that of Socrates, I respected the right of the community to make decisions, but not to be free of critique over that.
In real consensus process, participants fully express their own stands and then seek agreement, which is normally not one “side” or the “other.” It takes work, but that work can be done by very few, fully representing a large community, the full community could even be the population of the Earth. With efficiency.
I saw this on wikipedia, that attempts to set up consensus process — it’s known how to do it, and consensus was theoretically the basis for Wikipedia decision-making — were quickly crushed, because the factions that dominate Wikipedia would lose power. It is very common in established organizations for those who end up with excess power to strongly resist becoming more open and inclusive. See the Iron Law of Oligarchy. The result, for them, long-term, is often not what they would want. There is a way beyond the Iron Law, and it involves something ancient, the separation of the judiciary (advisory) and the executive (active), and a clear understanding of the roles and responsibilities of executives. Structures that I have set up have always allowed the community to walk away, if they choose, and easily recreate the whole essential structure independently of some rogue administrator or owner. However, this takes a certain minimal level of participation! I am not about to do all the work myself!