To think that Forum Foggers are a pain in the @rse

[estrogone]

Over and over again, I see threads where the OP is really clear about an issue or event.

Then what I call the foggers come along and almost deliberately misunderstand the OP - I don't know why they do it. They go off on a tangent and no matter how hard the OP tries to steer things back to the OP - the thread is all fogged up with irrelevant and sometimes bizarre posts.

AIBU to think it's happening more and more and to be really irritated by people who deliberately misread just so they can make a point?

//early morning attempt at irony // don’t know why you’ve got such a problem with fog, it’s a perfectly reasonable weather condition in the autumn…

seriously - yes. I’m seeing this lots but I don’t know if it’s really got worse. The posters who sweep onto a particular sentence and make it all about that or even worse, miss an obvious bit of information (sometimes it’s in the title) and then another 60 posters say “need to know what age DC are” when it’s perfectly clear or whatever.

but I do feel recently I’ve seen more recently that immediate answers to OPs are nasty/critical and then there’s an entire sub thread of that poster responding to critics of their post, and the OP doesn’t get any responses.

There really are a lot of posters very keen to put the boot in. I often wonder who they are, and what their motivation for posting on here is.

This is sooo true! It happens in real life too. Some people cannot (will not) just listen, think and respond. You start to speak and they're asking irrelevant questions or butting in to say you're wrong, before you even finish a sentence. It's a combination of Devil's Advocate Disease and a cat marking its [conversational] territory.

People don't bother to read even the first sentence of a post, or the title, properly. If someone posts about a problem with one of their DC, and includes the phrase, "My daughter is 6" in the first sentence, there will immediately be a tetchy little question by a poster, keen to be first cab of the rank: "How old is your DD, OP?"

I absolutely agree with this

It's deliberate. As soon as there's anything that might be mildly confusing these posters will dig their claws in. And then keep going, even after OP has clarified. It's tiresome

Yes they probably do have poor comprehension skills, but the goal is to put OP down. The goal is to prove OP is stupid and they are better.

God yes. Great name for it. I had a thread recently to discuss something difficult but instead spent a good part of it trying to prove that I wasn’t the OP of another similar thread from earlier that week.

I left a recent one where the OP asked for destinations for a "staycation"

Instead of offering suggestions people piled in about the meaning of the word staycation. 🙄

I don’t understand what you’re talking about? you’re just creating more “fog” with your thread and why are you using dashes? it should be a semi colon if you are continuing your theme? 😂🤣😂🤣😂
why do you care? YABU

There is nothing forcing the OP or anyone else to engage with those people, though. A lot of the time it’s the OP derailing their own thread by doing so.

I have never seen another forum where this happens on the scale it does on Mumsnet 😳

I'd guess it's a mixture of deliberate trolling and failure to read or understand the point the OP is making.

I agree AIBU is particularly bad for it. I would not ask for advice on AIBU these days. It's full of people who are looking for a villain/debate and they aren't particularly bothered about the topic so aren't engaging on a genuine level, but on a level of sport where they want to win.

It's not really how I use a forum - I tend to browse through Active and thread titles will catch my eye if they sound interesting, which usually means it's a subject I'm interested to read people's opinions on, or I'd like the answer to the question myself, or I think I can answer the question or I want to hear about this experience the poster is having.

The thing I find particularly egregious is how OP's aren't supposed to argue back with those giving them a kicking. If they do, then they're difficult and argumentative and should accept what "everyone" is telling them.

I also found it eye-opening how a poster recently admitted that they don't bother reading past the OP before responding because they just want to have their say, regardless of whether a hundred other people have already said it.

I reckon there are many psychological theses that could be written on the behaviour of Mumsnetters!

That would work if it wasn't always the case that the misunderstandings are to the OP's detriment and enable the commenter then to lay into her. For instance, I've just seen this on a thread where the OP is saying that, as a result of something her partner did, she slept in the spare room. Cue a long post saying she was unreasonable for banishing him to the spare room. And another one where a man has a terminal illness and the issue is that he doesn't want his partner to inherit the house that is jointly in her name unless she agrees to get pregnant with him: there are a couple of responses implying that the partner is trying to get the house at the expense of his children from a previous relationship - but there are no such children. This happens too often to be coincidental, it really must be people looking for a reason to hit the OP and making it up if they can't find it.

Well, the OP can decide what arguments they want to get into. But they can’t then complain if the whole point of their thread gets lost in those arguments - they’re part and parcel of any derailment.

What they can do is think. Think, is that post any help or relevance to my OP? No? Then I will choose not to engage with it and why the fuck is everyone else doing so?.

It’s so tiresome.

As is posters picking long irrelevant arguments with other posters on the thread.

Maybe those people should stay away from media that is solely based on written informstion and comprehension, then 🤣

Or at least resist making snarky comments or asking obtuse questions before they're sure they've actually read it properly.

We all make the odd slip up to be fair.

I think it can be deliberate - have you ever seen a group of teenagers (most often boys but not always) tormenting a teacher when they can smell blood in the water? It only takes one word, often not even the one they said and they can seize on it. I've encountered classes where 'back off' (one large student wanting to go through the teacher to attack a smaller one) has been misrepresented by the aggressor's friends as 'fuck off', 'well, you can't' as 'she called me a cunt' and I've seen teachers in tears because of misrepresentations/wilful misinterpretation leading to barrage of claims of racism against teachers of multiple ethnicities and faiths. They've not come up with the technique independently, it's seen in crowds all the time - a historical analogy could be in depictions of witch hunts, where a comment could be taken as an admission by a crowd and then anybody disagreeing could then be accused of being a witch/communist/whatever, too.

It's not just being dim, difficult or daft or not reading a question fully, it's a method of disorienting and intimidating people - and whilst online, it's not possible to be all shouting at once, getting up from desks and 'She swore! YOU SWORE! I'm going to get you fired!', it is absolutely possible to completely derail a thread out of malign intent.

Oh, yes. The number of times someone posts something along the lines of:
OP: IANBU
All of MN: Yes you are
OP: No I'm definitely not and you're all beastly.

It's wildly unoriginal and really tedious, and more often than not it's simply not true - the OP is in fact getting plenty of support, she just isn't rolling over and giving in to the bullies.

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

I'm sure there's a deliberate & malicious element however it seems to be mainly down to poor levels of reading comprehension.

But there's a 3rd category that annoy me. The ones who proudly proclaim that they haven't read the thread = I haven't a clue as to how this discussion has developed but I'm a prize know-it-all so I'll voice my opinion regardless.

The Haven't Read the Thread Folk will also miss the fact that the solution to OP's problem has already been suggested several dozen times, hence Cancel the Cheque among many other painful but funny examples.

I think some people don’t read the posts and other people only focus on something that allows them to get really angry.
Then exaggerate this and the ‘whataboutery’ starts. Well would you still be ok if [insert clearly offensive thing] happened. It didn’t. No one ever said it did. That’s not what the post is about.
It’s bizarre in here at times. But so is real life.

Exactly this. Exactly.

One thing that has always fascinated me is how they pick that particular thread-sometimes I have seen a thread and think "oh no", fully expecting the OP to be absolutely dragged; and surprisingly everyone is lovely-and then a relatively inocuous subject is derailed, the OP has their arse handed to them and it goes on for pages and pages

It is a weird phenomenon on AIBU.

Or the threads where someone refers to 'my partner' and 'they' and they get jumped on for not mentioning pronouns with people who act faux confused over the word 'they' even though it's bloody obvious OP is using it to refer to one person. And then they pretend it's not common usage and it's confusing. When it isnt, and basic reading comprehension means you pick up cues in the rest of the post, but yet they bang on and on and on and on....

It’s a form of trolling. A lot of it is what’s referred to as sealioning:

Sea-lioning is a form of trolling characterized by persistent, disingenuous questioning aimed at frustrating the target while feigning civility and sincerity.
Definition and Characteristics
Sea-lioning (or sealioning) refers to a type of online harassment where an individual engages in relentless questioning, often under the guise of wanting a civil debate. The sea-lioner pretends to be genuinely interested in the discussion but typically aims to undermine the other person's position by demanding excessive evidence or clarification for even the most basic claims. This tactic can exhaust the target's patience and create a false impression of a balanced debate, where one side appears unreasonable for not providing endless justification.

The notorious troll that has made hundreds of accounts is particularly relentless at this.

It comes down to poor moderation of the forum. People often cite that the daytime moderators of the forum are paid. If that’s the case, they should be expected and trained to know and recognise things like this so that they can moderate accordingly. It’s pretty easy to tell the difference between the ones that have poor comprehension and the ones that are trolling, so there’s no reason to give any benefit of the doubt.