What to do with repeated useless posters ?

[paolo bevilacqua]

Hi,

there is a small but significant number of people that brings no value to the forum as their post are invariably pointing some unrelated bugs, "this url will help you", or shameless cut-and-paste of NOT applicable material.

They are always the same names. Actually I think they can be the same person...

Does cisco wants to keep them on board ? A warning/block/ban mechanism perhaps ?

[paolo bevilacqua]

Since there is no guarantee that the OP will leave a fair rating if any at all, sometime people likes to set the record straight and do ratings as third party. Same for posts that are found by search, it's reasonable to be rated everytime that someone find them useful.

So I don't agree that only the OP should be able to use rating.

And, trimming down posts is always a time consuming and sometime biased activity, do I don't agree to that either.

What I would like to is to see some way to discourage people from posting at random.

[marikakis]

Hello,

I agree with Paolo that anyone should be able to rate posts. The posts here are not meant to be helpful only for the OP, but for other posters as well, including people who more often post answers than questions. If I learn something from a post or I think it has some general usefulness for people, why not rate it? It is also an indication of appreciation for the contribution of people to the community and an encouragement for them to keep posting (even when not appreciated by OP) so we can keep learning :-). I personally try to avoid saying I rated I post because I don't want the rating to be interpreted as a sign for the other person to rate my own posts in the future and we keep going rating each other's posts for the rest of our lives :-) Still, sometimes a small comment might be appropriate.

Kind Regards,

Maria

[marikakis]

Regarding the useless posts, I don't know what can be done in general. Just ignoring something that seems unrelated and post something related could be the least violent approach. You might even document why the unrelated post does not help or which is the correct direction to proceed and why. From my experience, the less emotional the support procedure gets, the better the outcome for everyone.