Revival

Yikes it has been a long time since I last posted something here... Well, see how long I can keep it up this time.

Decided a small course change for this blog. Instead of using it to post stuff others might find useful, I'm gonna post stuff I find useful. Like ventilating my frustrations about how folks sometimes behave when visiting a forum...

Usually you get to meet a lot of nice, friendly people, sincerely trying to find a solution for their problem. One thing that never stops to amaze me is the ignorance and backtalk you sometimes get from a visitor who desperately wants it his/her way and just refuses to see what is right in front of him/her? Yep, forcing horses to drink is still impossible...it is sometimes downright de-motivating. It gets especially worse if the visitor doesn't speak English but instead is relying on an online translation service to get his/her question on the board.

The risk of course being that the translation ends up having you say something that you didn't. Which works both ways of course, it also could have the visitor post something offending completely unintentional. Now, English not being my native language either, I too sometimes don't 'get it' at the first attempt. Usually this gets corrected pretty quick in the same topic, but sometimes...However, what do you do if a visitor puts words in your mouth you never said, and on top of that accuses you of something that completely missed the point by a giga-mile?

Normally you give such a user a little heads up, if it doesn't help you get a little stricter, and sometimes you end up using even stronger measures. (such as having your posts needing approval) Recently I got faced with such a situation. Visitor asks a question about which values a certain setting understands when directly editing config files. Well, this was even too geeky for me as I'd simply would press the button and be done with it, why doing it the hard way by manual edit? So I suggested to take the other way around thinking that the visitor would have not too much problems getting this translated.

Much to my surprise this person responds by starting name calling. Being human like the rest of us I wasn't gonna stand for this. This being the proverbial drop I placed this visitor on probation. At which point a repost of the same question appears, again accompanied by innuendo and false accusations. Did I ask myself if I made the right call? Of course I did, don't you ever second guess your own decisions? In this case, knowing there was a language barrier, I was even planning on giving the visitor the benefit of the doubt up until a couple of hours later when a topic appeared from a so-claimed coworker, tryin to ' mediate' . Again, this person too demonstrates a complete lack of understanding plain English by just ignoring what one of the admins responds with. and continuing to ignore the few simple rules in place

Mod decisions are not open to discussion
Personal attacks not allowed in public.

What makes me feel ambivalent is that this wouldn't have happened if only the visitor had been aware of his/her limitations in understanding what got said. As a result things got said that simply were unacceptable and downright incorrect, (and suddenly there was enough language knowledge to start name calling). What rattled my cage more was the refusal to personally deal with the situation afterwards and instead letting someone else try to pick the marshmellows out of the fire...

So please folks, if you ever visit a forum and you need a translator to read what it is all about, please find in your social circle someone who does speak/read/write the language at least enough to prevent such pittfalls.

Oh, and if there's anyone out there who knows of a forum where Maxthon is discussed in Brazilian Portuguese, drop me a line...