Subscribe Feed (RSS)The Story of a Forum Troublemaker: How to Handle a Wacky Situation
June 6th, 2007 by Joshua Dorkin | Filed under Commentary, Forums.How A Simple Forum Conversation Got Ugly
Some people just make no sense to me. Yesterday, a situation came up on our real estate forums that I had not seen before. A member who was relatively new (less than 2 months) made a post where he was trying to find buyers for properties that he had. In his post, he said, “I have properties for sale in PA, IN, OK, TX, TN, AR, LA. Please contact me for more info,” which I found to be pretty vague; I asked that he post more information (after going through this with him before, mind you).
In responding, he replied with a somewhat rude “Do you have a way for me to post a spreadsheet? Because I have 100 properties scattered! Are you interested in buying? No?”. As a result, I had to let him know that I was in charge of the site (which everyone can clearly see from my signature) and that he would need to be more clear in his posts if he wanted to use our site to make deals.
From there, things went haywire! Another member inquired about another issue that his post presented and he just went off. He started to insult me personally and began to act completely rude, picking apart my posts and challenging me by demeaning me. He also was nasty to the guy who challenged him.
I just don’t get it . . . did he think that by insulting and berating me that I’d allow him to continue posting on my site? Did he think that he would attract people to work with him by acting that way? It simply makes absolutely no sense to me.
Once this was brought to my attention, I found it most interesting that he had gone ahead and posted information about the properties he had available after all the posts where he was nasty. I kept the entire thread as an example for our members (but removed his posts where he posted the property info as I felt that he was not deserving of getting any exposure for them after his previous actions – btw. he tried to insult me again in the titles of some of those posts) of what not to do on our site, and have left it unlocked to see what some of them had to say about it all. It has been fun to read their thoughts!
While I’ve had to ban people many times before for breaking our rules or spamming, I’ve never had a situation come up where someone starts to attack me personally for no reason. It was completely unprovoked, and absolutely uncalled for. As a result of all of this, he was banned from our site. Normally, I’ll ban someone and move on, but I was so shocked by this one that I had to share.
BTW – I actually emailed the guy to see what his deal was, but it seems that he has not had the courage to respond.
Sounds like you handled it well. There’s no point in putting up with nasty people.
I have found that there are always a few nutcases on any forum. I do my best to avoid them. But obviously on your own site, you had no choice. Sounds like you tried to handle it fairly, but you were dealing with some who was irrational.
Markk & Lisa –
Thanks for your support on this one. Running a forum is like running a pre-school sometimes. You’ve got to keep all the kids in line once in a while.
You did the appropriate thing. His actions don’t make much sense, but on the internet I’ve seen some people completely lacking any sense.
[...] The Story of a Forum Troublemaker: How to Handle a Wacky Situationp a href timeforblogging 2007 06 06 The Story of a Forum Troublemaker: How to Handle a Wacky Situation a p blockquote How A Simple Forum Conversation Got Ugly Some people just make no sense to me. Yesterday, a situation came up on our real estate forums that I had not seen before. A member who was r…www.timeforblogging.com [...]
Such things used to happen in most of the forums, it is not all that easy to run a forum, because members comes from various country and with various background too. And most of this member just join the forum without reading the forum rule.