Irrelevant negative posts on Benefits forum

mattcanary

I don't know about anyone else but I am getting fed up of seeing so many threads on this forum getting hijacked by people passing judgement on the benefits system and people that claim or are thinking of claiming benefits.




The whole point of this section of the forum is to give people advice based upon how the system works, not how individual posters think the system should work.
There is a whole chunk of the forum dedicated to how things work and to give their views on this but it definitely isn;t here.




I must admit I have been guilty of getting involved in these disputes regularly recently. I feel I have to reply to these people.
I do it because new people to this forum must get such a bad impression of it and become disheartened from contributing in future as a consequence of this. They may think there is no help out there available to them, when there actually is.
Useful replies get buried underneath all the rubbish.


There are posters on here that are very helpful which is all well and good. However there are also some that offer very little, except pointless negativity and sometimes even abusive comments to the OP.


In the past, there was a sticky thread from the forum moderators asking people to keep to the subject and that rants against the benefits system are not welcome in this section of the forum..
This seems to have disappeared.


I think it needs to return - highlighted in bold!

tomtontom

The same could be said about your own posts mattcanary. You rarely offer any factual advice, and frequently encourage people to become dependent on benefits - which is in itself extremely negative.

We are all guilty of going off topic at times, but you need to look at your own posts before criticising others.

mattcanary

tomtontom wrote: »

The same could be said about your own posts mattcanary. You rarely offer any factual advice, and frequently encourage people to become dependent on benefits - which is in itself extremely negative.

We are all guilty of going off topic at times, but you need to look at your own posts before criticising others.

I've said in my first post that I am guilty of this - but I only respond to posters that go off topic and give the OP a needlessly hard time.


Although I often don't agree on what you say tomtontom, I wasn't really referring to you


Can't make my first JSA sign-on (a thread started today) is an example of what should happen here.
The OP went away happy with his advice and can now decide what to do, based upon more information and understanding about how the system works.




This thread could have deteoriated very quickly into a slanging match but didn;t. It is a pity more threads don't progress in this way.

tomtontom

mattcanary wrote: »

I've said in my first post that I am guilty of this - but I only respond to posters that go off topic and give the OP a needlessly hard time.


Although I often don't agree on what you say tomtontom, I wasn't really referring to you

You do not have to respond. If no one did respond to the off topic posts then the discussion would end. If you feel someone is being abusive then report them, do not encourage them further.

mattcanary

tomtontom wrote: »

You do not have to respond. If no one did respond to the off topic posts then the discussion would end. If you feel someone is being abusive then report them, do not encourage them further.

That may be best.
It's just I am not sure that the guilty party's initial post deserves reporting as abuse in all cases.


Although you do get to write in full your reasons why you are reporting the person.

Indie_Kid

There's no such thing as forum moderators on here. Even if there was, there's no way they'd be able to read every single thread on here I help moderate a rather large forum and am not able to read every single thread.

tomtontom

mattcanary wrote: »

That may be best.
It's just I am not sure that the guilty party's initial post deserves reporting as abuse in all cases.


Although you do get to write in full your reasons why you are reporting the person.

Then just ignore.

There's someone trolling the board at the moment, some of us figured him out pretty quickly but others are still responding and feeding him. The best thing to is to ignore in the hope that he'll (eventually) get bored.

dippy3103

tomtontom wrote: »

Then just ignore.

There's someone trolling the board at the moment, some of us figured him out pretty quickly but others are still responding and feeding him. The best thing to is to ignore in the hope that he'll (eventually) get bored.

I tend to agree with that.

Benefits do provoke strong reactions in many folk.