OK LOOK! If you reported a discussion because....

I know i kind of like it a lot when i said it... ha ha. i think a negative rating is fine when it's under the those circumstances.

YES! No thought is an island lol. I rather like that. In all my time here, I have never reported a discussion except for one or two that were directly abusive towards other users and NAMED THE USER in the title. I have only rated negatively for two reasons - someone posted something that made entirely no sense and wasn't even partially related to the topic I posted... or it was written entirely in another language so I wasn't able to understand the posting. I feel those are appropriate uses of the report and negative feedback features, and anything outside of those reasons are probably not appropriate lol.

Despite all the reporting that goes on around here and how adamant those 'reporters' are that they are in the right for doing it, as a normal and not psychotic user, I have NEVER seen all these 'duplicate postings' and 'duplicate discussions' they claim to see all over mylot. NEVER. But.. you know,... I come here and start a few discussions if I have some ideas, and I look at the discussion list to see what's around I can add my two cents to.... and I sometimes look up some of my friends so I can read up on their discussions and contribute, or visit a profile of a new person who answered one of mine so I can friend them or look at their interests. I don't come here hell bent on writing tickets or getting badges for acting like a moron on a daily basis lol.

Granted the referral link thing bugs me - if you want to do that, post ONLY under the making money interest or something, don't randomly post it all over, or spam friends with pms either.

I probably answer more than I start too... it's so much easier than thinking of all the topics that are out there! I sometimes think that when people go around 'reporting' things or complaining of duplicates, they must be LOOKING FOR THEM because as a NORMAL USER, that's something I don't really encounter here. If you use this site the way it's intended, you probably will not even NOTICE half of the drama that drama mongering people try to 'point out'. As far as the person who plaigarized my discussion... well, it must've been good if he thought he'd try to pass it off as his own and get more responses, right? Not to mention, my friends who had seen it once before went in there to post where it had come from anyway lol.

It's so freaking annoying, Dawn! And I just posted another discussion about adding more tags because some person - probably not even someone who posted in it - decided to add an abusive tag calling a discussion a 'duplicate' and I could not find ANYTHING that was the SAME before I posted it. I know that sometimes I will answer a discussion because it's more readable than another, even if they are both similar discussions. It makes my brain hurt to read a discussion that is worded so badly I have to reread it 4 times before I can figure out what the poster meant lol.

True, one person may make a really good discussion out of it, and another may make some badly worded point that you don't even want to acknowledge.

Sometimes it seems like things are always stacked against decent people and there are too many ways for people who want to be jerks to well.... be jerks. I try not to be purposely mean but it's hard to hold my tongue if I've been attacked for nothing! I never condone screwing with people 'just because' lol.

Oh absolutely. When people go around abusing reporting and giving negative feedback for inappropriate reasons, the whole community suffers. I point out things like this and talk about things like this because I want to promote GOOD USE of tools in this community, not bullying and harrassment of users by users because they want to screw the system. I want those rude people AWARE that their behavior does NOT go unnoticed and we ARE onto you, and sooner or later, karma is going to take a big chomp outta your butt

Ok... well if someone is posting the exact same discussion TWICE, it may be a double post as that has happened before. Your browser closes and the post gets eaten presumably before it posted, so you try to repost it. Mylot has no auto save feature so it is not saving what I'm typing as I'm typing it, if there's some sort of error, then I lose everything I've just typed. On the other hand, it is obvious plaigarism if you see an exact word-for-word discussion which has been reposted by a DIFFERENT user, and we've seen that happen too. In fact, a few times I had been given a heads up by another friend here that he saw at least one or two of my discussions plaigarized by another user, as well as a time when a troll user came in here and stole my avatar and tried using it to pass himself off as me. In cases like that, yes it makes sense to report because if you're a long time respectable user, you definitely don't want some numbnut going around degrading you by pretending they are you and ticking off users by posting inappropriate garbage and plaigarizing your (and others') discussions. This is mostly a vent about people who seem to have nothing better to do than poke around here on mylot and try to find fault with people they don't even know and accuse and report them of posting 'the exact same thing' as another user. Keep in mind too, this site has been around for something like 4 years. I'm not likely to respond to a discussion that is 1. 4 years old and has received no new posts in 4 years 2. the original poster has not been active or signed in in 4 years either. If you post a new similar discussion to one that is 4 years old... or even 3 months old and is not active, that's called being smart and updating. FEW veteran users choose to resurrect very old posts because it doesn't really get a lot of new discussion going, plus you are very unlikely to get any interaction from the original poster too.

It just makes no sense that some people are more taken with acting like internet police rather than contributing positively to things. Negative petty people drive me nuts and I wish they were all evicted from public sites. They are NOT safe for public consumption. If they encounter OTHER people who act like they do, they scream louder and fuss more than anybody, yet they don't even NOTICE how they act the same way. It's CRAZY!

I have met so many delightful people here... and even chat with them other places these days . Of course, any of the people who are being petty will NOT be people I reach out to, and I probably will attempt to avoid their discussions as well as HOPE I never have to encounter their disagreeable presence in my real life away from the computer I don't think I have actually seen a word-for-word discussion double posted here ever, and I would think that is the SOLE reason anybody should ever complain about a duplicate - if it REALLY is one. Duplicate means a carbon copy, not 'similar' lol.

Thanks! I'm kind of random here, sometimes I get drawn in and post a lot, other times I'm missing for a long time. There are times when this site can be a huge timesink because there are lots of good discussions, or threads that are VERY active, and keeping up can be almost a full time job in itself. There's also the matter of answering the responses you get, which I try to do as well. I agree that a lot of people are just looking for an excuse to be spiteful, I don't know why. Does it actually make them feel GOOD to be nasty to others, simply for the purpose of being nasty? I had an incident once with a friend who was accusing me of something but wouldn't TELL me what it was unless I went to HER HOUSE. Of course I refused, why leave yourself open like that on someone else's territory? What an unwise thing to do. When this *friend* starting calling my other friends trying to track me down because started ignoring her calls and emails, one of my other friends finally stepped in and told her 'you know what, do you want to WIN or do you want her to still be your FRIEND?!' Of course she said 'well I still want her to be my friend'. I think she just wanted to WIN, truthfully, she was only interested in being right and accusing me of whatever it was she thought I did. She did not care to be my friend at all because friends do not treat friends that way. My point in saying that is it seems there are people HERE who act that way too... they care nothing about contributing to ANY discussions, they just want to be RIGHT and they want to be applauded and given kudos for 'being right' and they figure that reporting others and getting warm fuzzies from admin will elevate them to some perceived 'great mylot contributor' badge of honor roll lol. Sorry, my sarcasm got a little outside the lines.

There's just better things to do than act that way. I don't want anything to do with people who seem to just pick through things in order to find something to report or get in a tizzy about. Folks like that apparently have no life, or why would they TRY SO HARD to be a jerk? I don't get it.