Need an Amnesty on Electronics Forums

[Bud]

It would not hurt to also bun a few morons who jumped at every Farington's thread with the only intent to make it more stink.

[tooki]

It would not hurt to also bun a few morons who jumped at every Farington's thread with the only intent to make it more stink.

Eh, I can’t begrudge people for getting annoyed with his threads. I don’t think the intent is to “make more stink” but to let off steam.

[tggzzz]

It would not hurt to also bun a few morons who jumped at every Farington's thread with the only intent to make it more stink.

Yeah, but Faringdon was amazingly adept at sucking newbies and casual readers into his threads, thus wasting their time and energy. IMNSHO it is "public spirited" to warn newbies and casual readers about "emotional/technical vampires". (See tooki's analysis for why "vampire" is an appropriate concept).

In addition, pithy comments can help posters improve their thought processes and questions. Not so with Faringdon, of course.

[PlainName]

Even if we assume positive intent (no malice), this kind of user is a drag.

Maybe. A typical thread (from any thread starter) will usually veer off into some semi-related argument. The initial topic may be interesting (or not), but later posts can unearth stuff that wouldn't otherwise have arrived. So who started a thread (and, conversely, who has a poor start-to-contribution ratio) may not be meaningful - it is what happens later in the thread that defines it as being useful or not.

Perhaps comparison of thread length might be interesting, on the basis that a long thread indicates user engagement. But to do that meaningfully it would probably have to ignore the usual contributors that are just bad mouthing the thread starter.

[Smokey]

...
Yeah, but Faringdon was amazingly adept at sucking newbies and casual readers into his threads, thus wasting their time and energy.
...

this... it got tedious having to have my troll filter set so high. 
Thank god the EEVSewer got a little less sewery.....

[EEVblog]

What’s the solution? I dunno. In a way I’ll miss the “oh jesus wtf” moments prompted by his unhinged theories, or his beginner questions that a supposedly experienced working engineer should have known the answers to inside and out.

From an admin point of view it is possible to put a user into a group that removes their ability to start new threads.
That's something I can do if people think that's best.

That stat you shared is amazing. 730 topics started from 2124 posts.

[jpanhalt]

I think limiting his ability to start new threads is a better solution; although, the statistic given suggests such contributions are infrequent.  I think banning should be reserved for only the very worst offenders.  Aside from China bashing, he is not overtly offending.

[SiliconWizard]

Yeah. I understand the ban here, but not sure I fully agree. The guy may have been obsessive but he's never insulted anyone that I remember of, or even been offensive towards China per se - more so towards western companies that allegedly outsource everything there. And while frequent, it's not like he started several of these topics a day, which would have been experienced as flooding.

Now, granted his contributions in terms of replying to threads other than his own were very limited, possibly even non-existent. I don't think that's per se a reason for banning users, but given the total number of posts, I admit that's not a very "friendly" behavior. We never quite figured out if he was just actively trolling, or if it was done in "good faith". As Nominal said, this may just be his own character and way of handling social interactions, which is why I personally have always cut him some slack. Also, while the core of his threads were always around the same topic, there were sometimes some more general elements (possibly accessory in his mind, I'll never know) that were interesting to discuss, if not really related to electronics at all.

Anyway, I probably won't miss his threads but they've never really bothered me either. I've seen way worse on online forums.

[floobydust]

He was the #1 thread starter for quite a while, it was a constant stream of useless threads that never ever reached a conclusion or solution. That was my main beef, he was leaving turds all over and making people angry. No contribution, just a vampire in the community.
That paper on the psychology of trolls said it is usually for attention or unmet childhood emotional needs that they post.
Conflating a tech issue, china, the Boss etc. is worthy of a ban. We don't need Harry Potter story telling here.

[EEVblog]

Now, granted his contributions in terms of replying to threads other than his own were very limited, possibly even non-existent. I don't think that's per se a reason for banning users, but given the total number of posts, I admit that's not a very "friendly" behavior. We never quite figured out if he was just actively trolling, or if it was done in "good faith".

The thing that needs to be taken into account here is that he has been banned before under the name Treez (changed to ocset), he was the most reported account on the forum.
IIRC, after a sob story I cut him some slack to come back as Faringdon, only for him to have been warned several times again.
I just remembered that he has also personally attacked a moderator here in the past. So I can't let this stand any more, he's banned.

[SiliconWizard]

Alright. And yes, I admit you already gave him a second chance.

[Gregg]

Treez, Faringdon or whatever moniker you’ve chosen lately:
What you need is a serious reality check.  Posting your problems on a public forum won’t make them go away.  You need to take a good hard look at yourself and ask “Who am I?”, “Where do I want to go in life?” and “How can I get there?”
You only have yourself and time; basically you are wasting a lot of your precious time with most of your posts to forums.  You can change yourself when you realize you are in charge of your own decisions in life; only you know all of the circumstances.  Life is hard, but can get easier once you learn to take charge of your own life first and foremost.
Ranting only makes you a whiner not a winner.
(Wouldn’t you agree? sic)

[Smokey]

...
We never quite figured out if he was just actively trolling, or if it was done in "good faith".
...

Seriously?  Did you really never read any of the crazy convoluted situations he was constantly proposing?  None of the threads he started were ever reasonable.  He was either an active troll or a schizophrenic (someone was always out to get someone else).  Either way it was just forum contamination. 

[coppercone2]

I don't think its either, it has a good chance of being a person caught up in company and industry specific BS.


For some reason he has the dedication of a conservative traditional japanese man to his industry. I feel like sometimes those guys kill themselves because they don't realize there is a literal high paying "do nothing" job waiting around the corner for them.


Like, the biggest thing I see, is someone refusing to accept sunk cost. It looks like a big batch of failure. You spent time on it, you gotta get out of it, you take some losses, which you can make up elsewhere. Its like having to accept you gotta learn something new.

It probobly feels sad if you spent ages looking through low cost LED driver circuits and that you might not need that in your next job. But its something you gotta accept and get on with life. In university you spend alot of time studying things you never need again


There is always some esoteric, usually low cost but complicated thing you can spend a ton of time on for a job thats literarly useless anywhere else. At least its electricity. Imagine you were in some cut throat humidity control industry.. now thats gotta feel like throwing gold bars off a sinking boat LOL. I knew some guy that was saying something about his job being third order differential equations for vent actuators in HVAC... basically that job was somewhat highly paid but all that technical info he got was basically totally useless elsewhere. He must have felt like he got back from a mirror universe on a episode of star trek when they started talking normal to him again LOL. Just pretend the information you got is a space ship that only works with the laws of physics in a parallel universe, at this point its a interesting memory and dead weight.

And its not THAT funny, the guy almost had like a kind of PTSD type thing going on because of that job. He kept thinking everything was going to get mega complicated, cheap, unstable etc.

Most places don't care if you can predict the failure point of some chinese diode run in a overloaded design. You might get lucky and get someone that tells you "get a part that works". 

[Halcyon]

Sad. Faringdon was good for an occasional laugh.

I was in a bad mood last night and just didn't have the patience for his nonsense. If Dave wants to bring him back, he's free to. I stand by my comments though.

[pcprogrammer]

I always thought there to be two sides to the Faringdon character. The SMSP person with threads I did not look into because it is not my field of knowledge, so can't say if they are worth anything, and the somewhat idiotic and simpleton work related story character. Lately the later mostly came up in the weekend as if he had no time during the week anymore.

Guess we will never know the true story behind the character.

Some very laughable and others just plain right nonsense or stupid. I was never bothered by it and joined in once in a while just for entertainment or to point out how ridicule the original post was. Lately mostly ignored them.

But looking at the statistics of thread starters, what about the forums personal youtube "AI" Homer J Simpson? He has a far worse ratio of starting threads (934 started on a total of 1230 posts). Most of his topics are showing youtube videos. Hardly ever looked at his postings since the thread names did not lure me in.

This is not a complaint. Just an observation.

[ebastler]

Whatever you guys decide. Personally I think a cooling-off ban of a couple of weeks is adequate, since Faringdon did not really receive a specific warning before the ban (in this thread or other recent ones, to my knowledge).

In any case, could we all please stop posting theories about a member's mental state, or other hypotheses about their personality? This is a public forum; the person being discussed is identifiable based on their long posting history; and this kind of discussion is extremely intrusive. Thanks all.

[tooki]

But looking at the statistics of thread starters, what about the forums personal youtube "AI" Homer J Simpson? He has a far worse ratio of starting threads (934 started on a total of 1230 posts). Most of his topics are showing youtube videos. Hardly ever looked at his postings since the thread names did not lure me in.

I don’t look at his threads, since by the time he posts it, YouTube will have already shown me the video hours or days earlier.

As I alluded to above, threads started is a poor proxy for actual helpfulness. It’s merely the least-bad option we have, short of examining every thread by hand and determining its intent.

Homer J’s threads are rarely helpful to me, but others find value in the videos he posts, but above all, they aren’t asking effort of others. It’s very different from someone asking for help over and over and over, but contributing nothing outside of his own threads. (And to be clear, I am not saying that only experienced pros contribute value, by being able to answer complex questions. Even newbies can contribute, whether by answering even simpler questions for others, or by engaging meaningfully in the process of answering their own questions. Or their questions themselves might be truly interesting. Or they have amusing anecdotes. There are many ways to enrich a community, and technical expertise is just one of them.)


Heck, in terms of vampirism and frustration, I don’t even think Faringdon was the worst; we have had a few extraordinary examples of people who suffer from severe Dunning-Kruger who thought they had come up with super-clever solutions (which couldn’t work), and steadfastly refused to accept the people who paaaaaatiently laid out in excruciating detail why it wouldn’t work, only for the OP to restate their beliefs as if nothing had happened. Some of those members eventually got banned.

Then we have the folks who do know a lot, but not nearly as much as they think they know, and who think they know better than the entire world. They argue disingenuously by using their own private definitions of otherwise established terminology, move goalposts as their arguments are carefully disproven by others, and insist others are wrong despite incontrovertible proof to the contrary. These members remain and continue to reply to, and often derail, threads.

(I will mention that I sometimes end up overconfident, but I am always willing to review what I wrote and learn from others. If I’m wrong, explain it to me, and I will amend my knowledge/beliefs.)

Closely related to the aforementioned are the members who reply frequently, attempting to be helpful, but who have a remarkable amount of irrelevant, erroneous or wildly outdated “knowledge” which they disseminate with confidence. So then entire discussions have to be held simply to correct the false statements, often prolonged by these members’ doubling down on their mistakes. This is particularly nefarious in replies to beginners who simply don’t have the knowledge and experience to identify bad responses. So other experienced members have to step in and make sure the beginner understands that a particular response is wrong, hazardous, or merely inadvisable.

[tggzzz]

Sad. Faringdon was good for an occasional laugh.

I was in a bad mood last night and just didn't have the patience for his nonsense. If Dave wants to bring him back, he's free to. I stand by my comments though.

We all have moments like that, and Faringdon/treez/ocset does provoke them.

The concept of preventing someone with that posting behaviour from starting threads is an interesting concept. My suspicion is that he would merely continue his behaviour in other threads. That would, arguably, be worse - it is possible to "ignore thread" but not "ignore subthread" (i.e. individual posts and replies to those posts).

The repeated behaviour after repeated bannings, and being the member with most complaints, are both significant. Hopefully his absence will reduce the mod's workload.

Also significant is his personally attacking a moderator. Fortunately the distances involved mean that is unlikely to have happened in person

Hence, rather reluctantly, I think a ban is the least bad way forward.

[Gyro]

Can I suggest that this thread be terminated at this point...

Halcyon banned him yesterday and Dave confirmed that ban in reply #34 today.

Faringdon has used at least 6 other identities on the forum, in addition to the officially sanctioned treez->ocset, some of them simultaneously. Despite the warnings that Dave alluded to (that we have no visibility of), temporary bans and numerous second chances, his behavior hasn't changed, a combination of thinly disguised anti-China diatribes, and using the forum as his personal AI engine to avoid putting in effort himself.

Dave has made his decision so further discussion, especially when it starts going off track (as ebastler mentioned), seems counterproductive. The phrase 'divorce due to irreconcilable differences' comes to mind.


Edits: Terrible punctuation!

[pcprogrammer]

But looking at the statistics of thread starters, what about the forums personal youtube "AI" Homer J Simpson? He has a far worse ratio of starting threads (934 started on a total of 1230 posts). Most of his topics are showing youtube videos. Hardly ever looked at his postings since the thread names did not lure me in.

I don’t look at his threads, since by the time he posts it, YouTube will have already shown me the video hours or days earlier.

As I alluded to above, threads started is a poor proxy for actual helpfulness. It’s merely the least-bad option we have, short of examining every thread by hand and determining its intent.

Homer J’s threads are rarely helpful to me, but others find value in the videos he posts, but above all, they aren’t asking effort of others. It’s very different from someone asking for help over and over and over, but contributing nothing outside of his own threads. (And to be clear, I am not saying that only experienced pros contribute value, by being able to answer complex questions. Even newbies can contribute, whether by answering even simpler questions for others, or by engaging meaningfully in the process of answering their own questions. Or their questions themselves might be truly interesting. Or they have amusing anecdotes. There are many ways to enrich a community, and technical expertise is just one of them.)


Heck, in terms of vampirism and frustration, I don’t even think Faringdon was the worst; we have had a few extraordinary examples of people who suffer from severe Dunning-Kruger who thought they had come up with super-clever solutions (which couldn’t work), and steadfastly refused to accept the people who paaaaaatiently laid out in excruciating detail why it wouldn’t work, only for the OP to restate their beliefs as if nothing had happened. Some of those members eventually got banned.

Then we have the folks who do know a lot, but not nearly as much as they think they know, and who think they know better than the entire world. They argue disingenuously by using their own private definitions of otherwise established terminology, move goalposts as their arguments are carefully disproven by others, and insist others are wrong despite incontrovertible proof to the contrary. These members remain and continue to reply to, and often derail, threads.

(I will mention that I sometimes end up overconfident, but I am always willing to review what I wrote and learn from others. If I’m wrong, explain it to me, and I will amend my knowledge/beliefs.)

Closely related to the aforementioned are the members who reply frequently, attempting to be helpful, but who have a remarkable amount of irrelevant, erroneous or wildly outdated “knowledge” which they disseminate with confidence. So then entire discussions have to be held simply to correct the false statements, often prolonged by these members’ doubling down on their mistakes. This is particularly nefarious in replies to beginners who simply don’t have the knowledge and experience to identify bad responses. So other experienced members have to step in and make sure the beginner understands that a particular response is wrong, hazardous, or merely inadvisable.

I have learned a lot since being on the forum about how incomplete my knowledge actually is. I now try to stay within my comfort zone when picking posts to reply to and also point out that I'm not an expert but can provide some insights.

No idea if it is really valued, but sometimes there is some nice interaction.

Have been involved in some of the discussions with the know it all's you mention. Sometimes fun but other times more time and energy draining.

[MK14]

Since people are throwing their opinions around, I will do the same.

My answer is a technical one (a flowchart, but in text writing).

IF they really are TROLLING, i.e. intentionally creating a ridiculously massive number of factitious situations, in the form of various threads.
THEN ............ Seriously consider (keeping) the ban.

[ELSE]But, if you think that the vast bulk (almost all) of their threads are genuine/real issues.  In which case, I'd much prefer to see plenty of relevant pictures (or it didn't happen).
I.e. of the circuit(s)/component(s) in question, of their setups.
THEN ............. Some kind of reconciliation, could be considered.

I DON'T think, preventing them from starting threads, would necessarily solve the problem, as they already have a 'database' of around 730 pre-existing threads, in which to unleash their activities, upon this forum.

[jonpaul]

Haylcon and Dave: BRAVO for finally solving this years long trool saga.

Especial thanks to our friend Tooki for his fine statistical research and analysis of the FTTS (Farrington Treeze Time Sink) posts, and replies.

HAVE AN ABSOLUTELY FANTASTIC DAY!


Jon in Paris...

[tautech]

IIRC, after a sob story I cut him some slack to come back as Faringdon, only for him to have been warned several times again.
I just remembered that he has also personally attacked a moderator here in the past. So I can't let this stand any more, he's banned.

Something Simon should have done ages ago. Same timezone and turned a blind eye. 

He gave the forum little more than entertainment.

[ebastler]

Especial thanks to our friend Tooki for his fine statistical research and analysis of the FTTS (Farrington Treeze Time Sink) posts, and replies.

And he made some other relevant observations too, in his follow-up post.