Are people built up or pulled down on the Forum?

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Rob2 said:
Unfortunately there is both building up and pulling down on CAF .

I am not alone in noticing strong negativity , unkindness , and a degree of offensiveness in some posts .

I may have been guilty myself . If so , I apologise .

Don’t be bullied though . Stand up for the opinions you hold sincerely .
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You got that right.
 
My intention is always to build up. Sometimes I’m a little harsh. Sometimes it’s warranted. Sometimes it takes tough love to help people, sometimes it takes toughness to defend people against what might be hurtful to them.

If I have acted here to anyone’s detriment, I am sincerely sorry. Sometimes my zeal to help people find the truth comes out in less than edifying ways.

-Fr ACEGC
 
I think one has to use discernment on this forum. Some people post genuine questions and are searching for the truth or need encouragement and such. But others are just agent procovateurs, they have no faith and are here only to sow doubt and provoke the faithful to anger and if possible, make them stumble and fall from the true faith.
 
I don’t know if I’ve built people up here or not, but I will say that for some reason I find it easier to be more uplifting here anonymously than on something like facebook where people are understandably more guarded about the things they wonder or the things they are going through.
 
Hope1960 said:
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Rob2:
Unfortunately there is both building up and pulling down on CAF .

I am not alone in noticing strong negativity , unkindness , and a degree of offensiveness in some posts .

I may have been guilty myself . If so , I apologise .

Don’t be bullied though . Stand up for the opinions you hold sincerely .
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You got that right.
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If any of it troubles you , @Hope1960 , I suggest you pm someone you trust and ask for suggestions on how to deal with it .

I’ve been surprised on how my concerns have been the concerns of others on the forum I have confided in . It helps ,
 
Tis_Bearself said:
were more open-minded and less judgmental.
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This seems to be a stumbling block for many of us. When our minds are firmly set regarding right and wrong, considering different opinions can feel like weakness or a betrayal of truth. It is easy to say, “I’m right and you’re wrong,” slamming the door on further discussion. It takes confidence, empathy, charity and patience to effectively engage with someone who doesn’t see things our way.

I’m not a font of Catholic knowledge and often I find it difficult to express complicated concepts clearly. Thankfully, there are members here with those skills and abilities. I come to CAF mostly for fellowship and a sense of community, joining with other Catholics and people of faith, and in that way this forum almost always leaves me feeling built up rather than pulled down.
 
I used to be quite active on a forum where there was a system of giving points to other members. So if you read a post, and liked it, you could click on a like button. A bit like the heart button on CAF. But in addition, you could also take points from posts you didn’t like. Your overall point balance appeared right next to your user name.

Unfortunately the result was that many users, myself included, would do anything to increase their point score and took pleasure in overtaking one of their rivals. So i would post any nonsense or wisecrack observation that I knew a lot of people would like, sometimes getting thirty plus likes for a single post and adding hundreds of points every day. I would also tread very carefully to the point of not speaking the truth to avoid upsetting anybody so nobody woul take points away.

The result was that the entire tone of conversation got increasingly phoney and it was quite difficult for me to tear myself free and delete my account.
 
I can definitely see the problems with such a system, as it encourages people to “play to the crowd”.

This forum has the opposite problem in that it doesn’t appear to matter much whether someone has made 500 useful posts and just a handful of flagged/ removed ones. They seem to get suspended in the exact same way as someone who has only made 10 useful posts and the same handful of flagged/ removed ones.
 
Tis_Bearself said:
This forum has the opposite problem in that it doesn’t appear to matter much whether someone has made 500 useful posts and just a handful of flagged/ removed ones. They seem to get suspended in the exact same way as someone who has only made 10 useful posts and the same handful of flagged/ removed ones.
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Possibly true. But I don’t think that has much to do with peer-driven accreditation, but more to do with moderator decisons. Some may consider moderators are too slow to shut down a disruptive member, whereas other may think they are too strict. It’s difficult to find a good middle ground and sometimes mitigating circumstances are not sufficiently taken into consideration. At the end of the day, moderators can misjudge just like anybody else.

Not on this forum but elsewhere I have indeed faced the wrath of moderators for posting something that I thought was so obviosuly absurd that everybody would see it as sarcasm, but some people obviously thought i was deadly serious and try to get me banned for speaking such terrible thoughts.
 
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Back when we could have signatures, I used a quote from St. Robert Bellarmine’s book, “the Mind’s Ascent to God” that was a helpful reminder to me:

"Let prayer delight thee more than disputations, and the charity which buildeth up more than the knowledge which puffeth up.”

This was from a Saint who did a lot of disputing for the faith!
 
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The posts I enjoy the most are the ones that have some humor or some “wiseguy” remarks. If every post was like this nobody would ever get advice and that would be counterproductive, always good to have nice posts filled with Bible quotes imo. But the occasional humorous remark lessens the “serious” tone that sometimes is present 😎
 
“Wiseguy” remarks can get a person flagged or suspended on here, even if you think you are talking to a friend who will take them in good grace. Unfortunately I know this by personal experience. If I am the least bit sarcastic or “wiseguy” on here now I practically write a book with emojis explaining that to try to avoid a repeat of the last go-round where I all of a sudden found myself locked out for a month.

Other people have been similarly suspended for what they thought was a harmless joke.
 
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In my experience the best approach is often to have an enquiring mind. Go for the wonder and don’t assume you know what a person means even if it seems obvious. Ask the person to draw out what they mean but don’t tear them down for it. God is the judge not us. If you feel that you’re getting ‘hot under the collar’ then step back, let the question sink in, examine the feeling and come back later to respond. Sometimes if you feel hot under the collar it’s because God is actually speaking to you through the other person and that person doesn’t necessarily have to be a Christian (God used my Dad once and he was far from being a confessing Christian!)
Most of all be humble and remember that God can defend Gods-self
 
My problem here is that I tend to focus on and respond to ideas expressed and not the individuals expressing them. I don’t follow individual posters and try to establish a mental picture, although this can sometimes happen with some frequent posters. And those images do not represent the complete person.
 
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