How to reply to a forum member who’s being rude and insulting.

[Allan Black]

When I was a moderator on the now defunct Panasonic 3CCDuser.com site for 4years, early on a couple of us mods. wrote a reply for any forum member who was being put down and insulted by another member.

We had admin. control panels to warn or ban any members, but we thought this was more fun for our people and less trouble for us mods. Here it is …

‘On the forum when a member is being rude and insulting you, here’s what you should do. On the notepad on your computer, write a reply, address it to the culprit make it as nasty as you like using all the profanity you can muster. Make it as long as you like, leaving no doubt his ramblings and opinions should be taken with a grain of salt but more likely, dismissed altogether.’

Get it all out of your system, but don’t log in and post it. For laughs leave it on your notepad for a couple of days then just delete it.

Cheers.

[Andrew Smith]

And add some Python-esque insults for good measure. :-)

Andrew

[Allan Black]

Hi Andrew and others, here’s another ploy which works. On the forum, if you receive a really nasty reply to your post, make sure the culprit has logged off, login and write a similar reply, post yours and log off.

Then wait EXACTLY 5 minutes, log in and delete it, replace it with a nice apologetic, ‘Gee I’m really sorry you feel that way, etc. etc.’ and post that.

In the previous 5 minutes the DVinfo system will have emailed the culprit that he’s received a reply, your nasty one. The chances are when he angrily logs in and reads your apologetic post, he’ll be totally nonplussed. On the Panasonic3CCDuser.com site we once saw that happen and we never saw the culprit again.
Cheers.

[Boyd Ostroff]

I'm a moderator at macrumors.com, which is the biggest site for discussing Apple and their products (aside from apple.com), with over a million members and more than 10,000 posts a day. It's like the polar opposite of DVinfo. :-)

We deal with rude and insulting forum members every day and I wish the solution was that easy! It's really amazing how carried away some people get. We have rules and procedures for all this, but on some days it's a real blow to my hopes for the future to see people behaving so badly.

One guy joined, immediately insulted several people and then complained about having his posts deleted. So, he started reporting every post he didn't like from other people and we finally suspended him. Next he started spamming the MacRumors contact page with complaints and insults. But he didn't stop there, he went to the MacRumors Wikipedia page and spammed it with complaints about free speech.

A few minutes later, after we perma-banned him and fixed the damage, he sends us this. Nice, but we didn't let him back in.

"Hi macrumors team,
I'd like to start off by issuing an apology. This doesn't excuse my actions, I'm aware of that, but I would like to let you know that I have been going through a rough patch and just kinda lashed out as a result of that."

By the way, with modern forum software (such as Xenforo) the moderators will still be able to see that over-the-top nasty message you wrote and then later deleted (there's a "history" button that shows all your edits). So you might want to put your insults in Notepad instead of posting and deleting them online. :-)

[Allan Black]

I hate to ask Boyd, not how much but are being paid? Our Panasonic3CCDuser.com site was started when about 2000 Panny released their GS400 camcorder, a big step forward in video quality.

Robin Liss who started CamcorderInfo.com in 1997, figured she’d start 2 satellite sites, Sony.com and P3U our site, thereby tripling her advertising base.

I joined P3U in June 2004, writing my stuff and was invited to become a mod. With the time difference from Sydney, I was the Night Shift Moderator for the northern hemisphere where most of our members were. There was 5 mods and it was great fun, on our control panels we could warn any member or ban him or her for 12hrs, 48hrs, 7 days or forever.

One time we were hacked off the internet, but soon reinstated with urgent updates to the software. Another time we were invaded by a disruptive ‘athletics club’ from Ohio, before we recognised them all and rooted them out risking being attacked on another site. But consensus was they had to go.

As I recall we didn’t have to ban any other members, though as the night mod. I did warn a few for offensive language. But we only reached about 1500 members when in December 2008, Robin Liss closed both sites quoting “Lack of resources.”

Cheers.

[Boyd Ostroff]

Haha... moderators and administrators at MacRumors are volunteers. There can be some benefits, but nothing in proportion to the amount of time spent. However, that's completely flexible and it's a fun group of people to work with. The main website has a paid editorial and techical staff, but the forums are separate (although we do interact with each other).

I'm a "moderator in name only" here at DVinfo. But I still remember the days when things got nasty and out of hand right here. That may have been a couple years before you joined? But it was crazy, people attacking each other in Canon vs Sony threads and 4:3 vs 16:9 rants. Kept the mods busy and more than one person got a "time out" back then!

Then there was GPSReview.net where I was a moderator for years. It just sort of wilted and died as people moved to smartphones and one day... it was gone. Back in the day, I got a % of the site advertising however. Not big deal, I think the most I ever made in a year was $600 which quickly tapered down to nothing.

Still a mod at gpsfiledepot.net, but (literally) 99% of the forum posts are spam which I have to manually delete (terrible forum software!).

Also a mod/admin at a small forum where people in my region (Southern NJ) discuss local issues, nature, recreation, history, etc. Generally a really friendly, relaxed place but every now and then.... And it's amazing the amount of spammers that try to register on this little site. Fortunately, it also runs on Xenforo which is pretty good at keeping the spammers out.

[Allan Black]

Interesting. Over on Quora seems there’s more mods than members.
Cheers.

[Boyd Ostroff]

Don't know anything about Quora. But there's only a handful of us at MacRumors and somehow we're (usually) able to manage all those posts and members.

[Allan Black]

Quora is an interesting concept for a social media website, you don’t need to register or have a password you can just post something to get ‘upvotes’ Individual forums are called Spaces, you can start one yourself and attract people to join, you probably get paid. They encourage you to join Quora Plus costing you so much a month.

But once anyone does join a ‘Space’ it’s hard to delete your ‘membership’ and I haven’t bothered so far, I just delete the news.

I first got involved when Paul McCartney was in Sydney last year in 2024. In June 1964 at Radio 2UE in Sydney when the Beatles arrived for their Aust tour we did our breakfast session nationally from the bar in the lounge at Mascot airport. With many hundreds of wild excited teenage fans in the rain outside, it was quite an experience. We all wore Beatles security idents, but were warned not to go outside for any reason whatsoever, we all were to scared to. lol.

I posted that time on ‘Beatles Across the Universe’ but now the shine has worn off Quora.
Cheers.

[Andrew Smith]

Speaking of which, the film "Across The Universe" (with all Beatles music) is one of my favourites of all time. And to think I only saw it because another film I had turned up for wasn't happening and so we went off to find another cinema and choose something out of what was available.

Andrew

[Allan Black]

Andrew, I was lucky enough to meet the Beatles, well 3 of them. In June 1964 when they arrived in Sydney for their Aust tour, the DJs at Radio 2UE where I was working, received invitations to meet them at a press reception at their hotel. A few who couldn’t go passed their invitations over to me and my buddy.

So we went, the room was packed and we lined up to welcome them on behalf of 2UE where we broadcast all their records as soon as we got them. I wanted to tell them we adjusted our 45 turntables to run at 48rpm so their music sounded more exciting than our competition but I could see it was just too noisy in there and they might not follow my Aussie accent.

However, Paul thought our girls were very pretty, John liked the air in Sydney he said it was very clean and George liked our ice cold beer. Ringo was still ill in London and his replacement Jimmie Nicol was still jet lagged and speechless, stunned by Beatlemania on the other side of the world.

I took my camera but wasn’t allowed to take any photos so after an hour we left. But it sure was an experience I’ve repeated at parties over the years.

Cheers.

[Andrew Smith]

That's hilarious about speeding up the turntables to do 48 rpm. Did you get the station techs to make the adjustment, and was it noticeably perkier in terms of what the listeners would actually pick up on?

I just want to say that in no way have I ever deliberately played a dull song at 45 rpm instead of its rated 33 rpm. :-)

Andrew

[Allan Black]

Hi Andrew. Like today, back in the 1960s competition between Sydney radio stations was intense. In 1964 I was the 2UE breakfast producer/panel operator, we enjoyed the top ratings in Sydney.

When the Beatles arrived everybody went nuts, a couple of us came up with the idea of slightly speeding up our fixed speed 45rpm turntables, saying our Beatles records will sound more exciting than our competition. But by how much? Obviously too fast will make our music sound wrong, so in Studio E we carefully wrapped some tape around the belt drive of turntable and played a 45rpm Beatles record.

By listening, with trial and error it worked but we didn’t know our new speed. However we did know we couldn’t adjust all the ‘on air’ turntables so we put the idea to management and the technical dept, knowing they could do it mechanically and confirm what the new speed is.

But trouble! the older techies didn’t want to do it, it would be sacrilege, misaligning the equipment they spent hours keeping maintained.

And they had some clout, but we kids, I was 19 and was also listened to, got our way and some of our 45rpm turntables were adjusted to run at 48rpm and it worked. Soon I heard we got feedback from fans, to them our Beatles music sounded more alive as some put it.

A funny side to this was it took a while for our nearest competitors, 2SM and 2UW to figure out what we were doing.

For me that was the best part. Here is an illustration.
Cheers.

[Andrew Smith]

Just took a look at Wikipedia for the history of direct drive turntables and they were only first released in 1969, so no wonder you were using belt drive turntables at the station. For the uninitiated, direct drive turntables give a locked-on consistent speed when playing records and the professional ones used in radio stations could start up and achieve this lock-on in a quarter of a revolution.

I'm not at all surprised that the most fun part was waiting for your competition to figure out what you had done. This all brings me to what I've said to may people over the years, that half the entertainment in radio is behind the scenes!

I could always tell the story of being "this close" to getting busted raiding the CD library of the number one rating radio station where I am .... but it's too much typing! :-) Very few people know the story!!!

Andrew

[Allan Black]

Hi Andrew, from previous experience as a moderator on the Panasonic site, when a subject or topic gets too many replies down the page, many people don’t bother to scroll down from the top. So I’ve started another topic in answer to your reply. When the Beatles were in Sydney.

Cheers.