News/20080512

In re Trolls
PvXwiki has, as I'm sure many people are aware, experienced a steady increase in the amount of trolling and disruptive behavior. However, the Admin team has largely turned a blind eye to such activity. After all, generally speaking, there's no harm in letting people have their fun. Unfortunately, it has become increasingly more difficult to ignore the deluge of trolling that pervades PvX. There's a difference between harmless trolling and "We're gonna flood RCs trolling." Even then, were people willing to contain their trolling solely to user talk pages and use Minor Edit we might have been able to continue to ignore it. Lamentably, this has not been the case. Indeed, that "harmless" trolling has increasingly become the source of NPA violations, 1RV violations, and general wiki-drama. Yes, we want to allow people to have fun, but when that fun begins to have an increasingly deleterious effect on the Wiki and the community an appropriate response has to be developed and it has gotten to the point where the Admins are essentially left with two options: make a decision to ignore the trolling once and for all or ban the offenders. Yes, we're never going to be able to eradicate all of the inane/elitist behavior that goes on on PvX, nor would we necessarily want to, but we do want to make an attempt to improve the community.

If I thought that posting this note would be enough to quell even a fraction of the trolling that goes on on PvX, this would be the end of the message, but I don't and this isn't. For all the trolls on this wiki, inveterate or otherwise, consider this a final warning.  From this point forward, disruptive trolling (i.e. trolling which has a deleterious impact -- to be left to the discretion of the Sysops) will result in a permanent ban.  Furthermore, Sysops are vested with the authority to protect the offender's talk page from non-Admin edits (to prevent further trolling). Finally, Sysops are authorized to revert on sight any edits made by sockpuppets of the offender and to ban the sockpuppet.