As I am sure many have seen, there is an ongoing barrage of posts about how awful N64 emulators are.
These are constantly being posted under various user names, and being deleted shortly after being posted. They usually are accompanied by disparaging comments about anyone who's answered a previous one.
Can we have a short cut to getting these nuked or something? Or how shall we flag them?
Keep flagging these as Rude or Abusive (when they are), and closing them (when they're off-topic). The system isn't used to this kind of troll, but it should kick in soon and automatically get rid of the questions as they appear.
If you think there's an on-topic question hidden in there somewhere, please edit the question. Even if the posting user's acting in bad faith, it's better to salvage perfectly good, on-topic, answerable questions from their terrible framing if at all possible.
(The rationale I added later.)
The way to deal with trolls is to have everyone just ignore them. But as the folk wisdom goes, ‘everyone will not just’. I could write here a very strongly worded piece of advice that nobody ever respond to the troll under any circumstances whatsoever, not even to ‘talk some sense into them’, but I doubt it will be very effective. In the couple of hours it takes to close and delete the rant through normal means, someone will inevitably post a comment, break the silence and engage with the troll. And the troll will just latch onto that little nugget of narcissistic supply as motivation to post further abuse. To prevent that, the abusive questions should be closed, locked and deleted as quickly as possible. As they say, what deters in a punishment is swift inevitability, not harshness.
So I think this is exactly the kind of coordination problem that demands moderator action. And if you need an objective process/criterion as a backstop, here’s my proposal: implement a moratorium on gaming and emulation questions.
Meaning: any question submitted from an account with less than 200 reputation that mentions emulators, video games, consoles, arcade machines, controllers, cartridges or other gaming peripherals can be flagged to ask a diamond-moderator to unilaterally close it and disable comments. (Maybe with a link to this answer as explanation.) If re-opened, the question would no longer be subject to the moratorium and may be answered normally.
The moratorium would be indefinite, because I don’t want those trolls just ‘wait it out’ until some arbitrary deadline is over; I want them to actually go away. When they do, we may think about lifting it.
