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marilyn_pratt
Active Contributor
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Don’t Feed the Trolls

You probably have heard of this formal or informal rule which basically means: people who want to disrupt our online community are insatiable (they have an appetite for this that can’t be appeased or satiated or fed to satisfaction).  So “Don’t Feed the Trolls” basically means please, don’t spend your precious time, energy and resources dealing with people who want to distract you from your real work here, be it to: post knowledge queries, share professional experiences, provide answers to technical questions, acknowledge and highlight helpful content, critique or comment on products or services, or update the community about relevant events, projects, activities, conversations.

What’s a Troll?

Wikipedia defines a troll in the following way:

"A troll usually has little or no interest in contributing to the development of the site in question and is interested in:

  • Deliberately angering people.
  • Breaking the normal flow of debate/discussion.
  • Disrupting the smooth operation of the site.
  • Deliberately being annoying for the sake of being obnoxious. For instance, using abusive names to refer to all the members on the site.
  • Making itself the main topic of interest or discussion."

Let’s starve the trolls by:

  • Ignoring
  • Alerting sapnetwork.com only if there is defamatory or incendiary or damaging content
  • Ignoring
  • Alerting moderators or our SCN team only if there is defamatory or incendiary or damaging content
  • Ignoring

A helpful guideline or rule of thumb to responding to comments is embedded in this blog: Don’t Feed the Trolls- 3 Rules to Follow When Responding to Comments

  • Ignore flame war comments or pure negative comments
  • Respond to criticism (as differentiated from pure negative vitriol or poison ) when something needs to be clarified
  • Always respond to positive comments

It’s obvious how caring the community is about the quality of posts and the quality of the conversation on SCN so a huge thanks to all those that keep us on our toes about the type of content and tone in our community.  And thanks to those that are watchful in those places where conversations become inappropriate and either press "abuse" button or send their concerns to sapnetwork.com.  

We of course welcome dissent and invite original thinking, so please, avoid thinking someone a troll just because they critique or have a different point of view.  Sometimes hearing things we don’t “like” are the most important types of listening we can do.

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