Anonymous wrote:
Come on, you don't really think all the snark is coming from ONE person, do you? Or even 10 people??? Jeff, can you verify that all the evil on DCUM is not traceable to a particular poster?

I can verify that all the evil on DCUM is not traceable to a particular poster. However, I think many of you would be surprised by how much negativity comes from so few posters. There are a handful of posters who will post 20-30 posts a day, most of which are either outright mean or, at a minimum, snarky. I try to block them, but they are very determined and find their way back in. They post so frequently that it is very difficult to control them. Maria and I have pet names for most of them.

Anonymous wrote:

A second vote for this, Jeff. There is one poster in particular looking for a fight. It can be exhausting and add unnecessary stress to someone who is genuinely seeking support in good faith.

I think many newcomers to DCUM are turned off by this behavior.

Come on, you don't really think all the snark is coming from ONE person, do you? Or even 10 people??? Jeff, can you verify that all the evil on DCUM is not traceable to a particular poster?

I prefer that only Jeff have the ability to delete posts or threads. These threads are discussions, and people spend time and thought setting out their thoughts and asking questions. Allowing an OP to delete a conversation, or to delete the original post, which usually sets up the issue, would seem to me to give one poster too much control over the discussion. In any event, it be the OP who makes snarky comments, or the "victim" of snark may be a poster mid-thread. I am frustrated by the snark too, but I'd be more concerned about headed toward censorship.

Anonymous wrote:

A second vote for this, Jeff. There is one poster in particular looking for a fight. It can be exhausting and add unnecessary stress to someone who is genuinely seeking support in good faith.

I think many newcomers to DCUM are turned off by this behavior.

I don't think we are prepared to turn DCUM over to 70,000 some moderators. Each post has a button labeled "report". If someone is disrupting your thread, use that button. I will intervene if I feel that it is necessary. If I do intervene, I will then spend the next week and half debating my actions with users who don't think I should ever intervene in a thread. But, that's my problem.

A second vote for this, Jeff. There is one poster in particular looking for a fight. It can be exhausting and add unnecessary stress to someone who is genuinely seeking support in good faith.

I think many newcomers to DCUM are turned off by this behavior.

I was thinking of the OP having the authority to not just delete her original post but rather delete the entire thread that she started. Sorry I didn't explain myself well before.

I thought the authority to delete might be connected to the author's IP address maybe? Is this not possible?

Any ideas on how to stifle the unnecessary snarky responses (example above)? They totally detract from those truly seeking support sometimes. And if the OP herself doesn't feel the thread has been supportive and, in fact, feels it has had the opposite effect for her, maybe she should delete the entire thread. This might take the motivation out for those who want to just be snarky because after all their effort to just be mean so they could watch the aftermath, the thread would have been deleted anyway.

Anonymous wrote:Will you ever add this feature? Why not give OP's this control to limit or discourage the snarky comments on this board?

It would be very difficult to add a feature allowing the poster of the first post of a thread to delete that post. This is due to the relationship of posts and topics (threads) in the underlying database. Topics and posts are both types of database records. A topic record is very tightly linked to the database record of the first post of the thread. This was a design choice of the authors of the software. Changing this would be a very fundamental change that would have many ramifications. As such, it is not something we are interested in tackling.

But, the most obvious problem is -- given that the vast majority of posters are anonymous -- how would the original poster even be able to identify herself? Even if posters could delete their own posts, utilizing the feature would require a huge cultural change among our users -- a change for which little support has ever been shown.

Finally, I am not sure how that feature would even accomplish your goal. If you begin a thread and receive snarly responses, deleting your original post would have no effect on the responses.

If you want control, start your own website/blog. Sheesh.

Will you ever add this feature? Why not give OP's this control to limit or discourage the snarky comments on this board?