MCPS forum - trolls or just 2 or 3 bored people?

[Anonymous]

The MCPS forum usually has a good share of overly involved, ridiculous posters, but in the past month we've had many threads that have gone off the rails quickly and devolved into rapid back-and-forth bickering with the same non-information over and over.

Are these just trolls? Are these a handful of people that seem to have nothing better to do than spend 24 hrs a day on DCUM?

Anyway, thank you Jeff for responding to my increased reporting this week. I'd actually like to be able to discuss things in the next few weeks, because how MCPS responds to rising Covid cases is likely to be a rapidly changing situation. I'm sure the other sane folks who attempt to post there agree.

[jsteele]

I don't follow that forum close enough to be able to comment. I am pretty much on autopilot when I respond to reports so I haven't noticed any trends.

[Anonymous]

The rate of parallel thread spawning and then everything devolving into general bickering is high this week. I just submitted three to be locked with a link to a fourth. Out of curiosity - can you tell how many people are posting a significant amount in those threads? It just seems like 3 or 4 people mostly, but maybe there really are 25-30.

[jsteele]

Anonymous wrote:The rate of parallel thread spawning and then everything devolving into general bickering is high this week. I just submitted three to be locked with a link to a fourth. Out of curiosity - can you tell how many people are posting a significant amount in those threads? It just seems like 3 or 4 people mostly, but maybe there really are 25-30.

This is real back of the envelope and most likely has some margin of error, but one thread appears to have 30 distinct posters, the second 17, the third 33, and the thread that is still open has 95 for a total of 175. Among all three threads combined, there looks to be 132 distinct posters. So, there is some overlap but not a lot.

[Anonymous]

Thanks! ~130 seems right. That’s the number of views for threads with low post counts. And that also matches the sense of some threads starting like they have many voices, and then devolving into 5 or 6 squabbling.

Thank you for what you do!