| Shill postings, reported posts, and the tone of the DB forums
Lately there has been a repeated cycle going on here in the DB forums, mostly in the basses forum. The cycle goes something like this:
1) New members post glowing reviews of products they purchased from a particular shop or retailer.
2) Members of the forum, thinking that the new poster is a shill, chime in with veiled and sometimes not-so-veiled accusations of shilling.
3) The tone of the thread deteriorates, as other members accuse those suspicious of shill posts of making the forums "unfriendly" and "unwelcoming", with a bit of "elitist, exclusive, old boy's club etc." thrown in for good measure.
4) Other forums start threads discussing how TB is an unfriendly, elitist Jazz-Orchestral-only forum.
5) Wash, rinse, repeat.
Some of this is unavoidable - you can't please all of the people all of the time. But there is one thing we can do better, and I'd like to ask everyone to try to help me do that: namely, when it comes to suspected shill and troll posts, please do the following:
1) Report the post(s) in question.
2) Be patient. I won't speak for Jeremy and Damon, but I know that I often feel like I'm too busy to really do the best job here on the forum that I can, especially considering how fast things can get out of hand in a format like this one. If there are shills and trolls around, it takes time to gather enough real proof to act, and part of that time involves getting the other mods - most of whom are also very busy outside the forum - to weigh in. Unless a case is completely cut and dried, it's usually better to confer with fresh eyes and ears, and this takes time.
I welcome your comments and suggestions, and encourage you all not to be shy about using the report feature. There simply isn't time to read everything, and I think that a lot of unpleasant situations could be cut short or avoided entirely if the mods were to be made aware of untoward situations earlier. Help us help the forum!
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