TechRepublic needs killfiles

I wouldn't put you or anyone in a killfile simply because I disagree with them. I never did that when I was on Usenet and had the option to. In fact, most of the individuals whose posts I flagged so they would stand out and be the first to be read were ones who disagreed with me and could put those reasons into a well-written, intelligent post that made me think. Besides, what fun is a discussion that goes something like this:

Me: I think such and such.
Someone_else: Me too!
Another_person: Me too!
This_other_guy: Me too!

That's kind of boring.

You bet there are plenty of people out there that find me arrogant or worse. Drop on over to the "USB 2.0 a Goner" discussion and you'll find plenty. I'm also the guy that invented Larry's Law of Lame Posters right here on the TechRepublic boards: Not all managers are stupid (there are some very bright ones), but most stupid posts come from managers. That lit quite a few people up. Killfiles work both ways.

Thanks for the welcome. It is nice of you, and is appreciated, but I'm not new here by a long shot. I've been in the Top 100 posters list quite a few times myself. I drop in and out as time allows, so I'm not consistent enough to stay in it all the time.

In an ideal world, that would be the case. But in some discussions, one or two people often make up for a large percentage of posts. Look in a discussion of 300 posts and you'll often see one particular individual has posted 100 of them. This person never does anything but lower the S/N ratio and basically renders the "next" button useless.

I'm not talking about people like you, apotheon, Tony Hopkinson, HAL 9000, et al. You guys post a lot but also contribute a lot to the intellectual level of most discussions. I'm referring to people you are both stupid and prolific. It's okay to be stupid, and it's okay to be prolific, but stupid and prolific is a Bad Thing, especially when there's a simple solution.

we all need to check our assumptions occasionally.
I know I do. If we don't get a shock we tend to get complacent and assume our world view on all subjects is accurate.

Wikipedia's first definition of STFU is: special transitory food unit. That being stated I will feel much freer to use that in future discussions, as soon as I stop laughing!

already, just don't read posts by that person.
[ unless replies to it indicate that they did post something worth reading. ]

There isn't really any solution to that, but that didn't keep killfiles from being invented anyway. Sure, when reading newsgroups I'd occasionally get a "jump discontinuity" as it skipped over a post, but that's more than made up for by the convenience of not having to skip over the other one in the first place. You get used to it after a while and, since the post you were just reading was a response to someone you've deemed lacking in any redeemable qualities, you probably weren't missing much anyway.

There actually aren't many people I'd plonk on TR (I can count them on one hand and still have fingers to spare), but it would still be a nice feature. Besides, killfiles (or ignore, which seems to be the less archaic term) are voluntary and up to the particular user. If you want to read every post by every person, more power to you. If you want to disregard posts by certain users, that would be up to you.

I like to read all posts in a discussion before posting, so I use the "Next" link to do this. However, I won't even bother reading discussions in which znkjryy rqvfba (<--name ROT13'ed to protect the stupid) participates because I have to click "Next" right through so many of his posts. It would be nice to be able to read a discussion without having to click 100 times unnecessarily.

But the actual clicking isn't so bad; it's the fact that TR tends to get a little unresponsive at times, so waiting for it to load a vacuous post 100 different times can add up to an hour of wasted time. Also, since the "Previous/Next" link is UNDER the post, it's not always in the same spot; it depends on the length of the message, so you almost always have to scroll or move the mouse to get to it. Maybe it's the engineer in me, but little things like this irk me.

I've always found rating posts to be useless. Even Slashdot's system, as multilayered as it is, is only one step above nothing at all.

Unfortunately, asking these kinds of individuals to stuff it usually just ends up adding two junk posts to the discussion: my request, and their "Now let me explain to you why I'm so mentally superior to you in every conceivable way, you Mensa peon" response.

That word sounded vaguely familiar, but I couldn't put my finger on where I heard it. I asked a friend who is in the Navy about it. He was familiar with it, so it seems to be more of a Navy term than an Army one. We do appear to share the phrase "roach coach", though.

Post edited to replace the word "fried" with the word "friend". After serious consideration as to whether I should just leave it that way, perfectionism won out.