i've never needed to do this before but is there any way to block seeing comments by a user on SE sites?

@cas No. If the user is being abusive, or just too aggressive, we can ask them to stop commenting on your posts. That's about all we can do.

great. i've attracted the attention of an obnoxious kook and now he's following me around downvoting my answers and posting passive-aggressive comments. i'd prefer not to see his comments so i'm not tempted to respond to them.

@cas You have my sympathy :( Do flag any comment that isn't constructive.

and don't answer in kind

Is it schily? He's the poster child for knowledgeable, but impossible to work with. He's on some kind of anti-{Linux,GNU,Debian,...} crusade and lashing at anyone who doesn't join him.

yep. i made the mistake of telling him i wasn't interested in his (irrelevant and clearly missing the point of the Q) answer to my question or his anti-gnu prejudice. i don't know if he's recognised me as a DD but i expect it to get worse if/when he does. AFAICR I've never had the misfortune of interacting with him directly before but I remember the arguments on various debian lists from years ago.

i wouldn't exactly call him knowledgable, either. he ossified years ago and he's way too opinionated for any knowledge to seep in.

knowledgable in a very limited domain, perhaps.

@cas Oh, you're Craig Sanders? Hi. We didn't know we had another DD here.

I guess that makes three now...

@cas Oh, bugger, I deleted the comments there and weighed in on your side. Do flag if he continues.

There's Stephen, and I forget the third one.

@terdon "bugger" is something English people are supposed to say. :-)

@FaheemMitha True, but hey, I've already told you I've been infected. I also say aye and cheers.

@FaheemMitha: yep, that's me.

@terdon, yeah i saw. i'm trying hard to just ignore him. the worst thing is that his irrelevant and obnoxious answer seems to have put off anyone else from answering my Q about xargs, and i would like to know the answer to that.

Gilles or Stephane are your bests bets there.

@cas link?

By the way, I get that you're pissed but your answer to schilly's first comment (about alias -p) was a bit more aggressive than necessary. I know it's hard but do try not to feed the flame.

@cas Sorry, no idea. Stephane might know.

schily's post doesn't address the question at all, he's just using that as a platform to rant

Yeah, I'm kind of surprised Stephane hasn't answered that one yet. Seems like his cup of tea (sorry @Faheem).

@Gilles, yep. that's why i eventually told him to answer the Q or go away in the comments that terdon deleted.

@terdon, perhaps. but i suspect the only reason he responded was because he carried a grudge from the other day and was looking for any excuse to downvote. the Q was subjective, and my answer was clearly only about bash aliases yet he downvotes it for being about bash. i thought of my response as dismissive, not aggressive.

@cas You may well be right. I've just learned that feeding this sort of thing rarely ends well, that's all.

Next time, just flag it and we'll deal with it.

What's alias -p anyway? It seems to do the same as alias on my bash. Presumably, it's a more portable flag or something?

> -p Print all defined aliases in a reusable format

I guess bash defaults to that but other shells don't.

Ah, yes. ksh needs it, for example.

dash doesn't support alias -p:

ditto for zsh. it works in ksh, maybe it's specific to ksh.

It's not POSIX anyway.

I had assumed it was.

POSIX says that alias has to display lines of the form NAME='VALUE' with appropriate quoting for the value (so no leading alias). Bash complies if you run it in POSIX mode.

Hmm. So what's more portable if you want to get a list of your aliases in reusable form? alias alone or alias -p?

alias alone. But aliases are a command line thing, portability isn't important.

alias alone.

@terdon It's just funny to hear people say that. :-)

I used to say it quite a lot at one point, myself.

what's even more amusing is that after berating me for being bash-specific, he then posts an answer that begins "If you are not only interested in bash and zsh, you may be interested in a completely different method that ..." that doesn't even answer the Q.

@cas Like @terdon says, keeping your cool is the best way to deal with people like that. Completely ignoring him is also a good option. I often do that in such cases.

You're not required to respond to every comment. You aren't a teacher here.

@terdon I remember I used to say "bugger" to general American bemusement. And American A telling American B "Have you seen 'Four Weddings and a Funeral'? They say that a lot there."

one of the main reasons i come here is to teach. i'm particularly interested in teaching those who are capable. i see it as a duty to pass on useful knowledge to the next generation.

@cas Next generation? I don't think you're that old. :-) But anyway, I think that sometimes the urge to teach needs to take second place.

50 in a few years.

So, how are you finding SE? We don't get many DDs here.

For whatever reason. I just counted 3. There might be others lurking. @terdon Do you count three?

@cas Ok.

@FaheemMitha I don't remember. I only know Cas and Stephen.

@terdon There's a third one. I forget his name. Someone pointed him out. I thought it was you.

i've been on SE on and off for several years. come and go (usually when my health gets bad again). i keep coming back so i guess it's worth it to me.

@FaheemMitha Cas is not new here, by the way. He's been here twice as long as either you or I :)

@cas Ok. Well, glad to see Debian people around. We don't get many Debian-specific questions here, though.

@terdon I wasn't suggesting he was new here, but I had not previously noticed him.

iirc i started on serverfault.

@FaheemMitha you were asking about DDs here and I mentioned him quite a while ago. That might be what you remembered:

there's lots of debian, ubuntu, mint, etc questions. and lots of generic distro- or unix- -agnostic Qs

@terdon I've been on U&L Member for 4 years, 7 months, and cas has Member for 4 years, 4 months. So. no.

Unless you are talking about SE in general...

@FaheemMitha Oh, my bad. Twice as long as I then.

@terdon Yes, maybe. I thought there was a third, but maybe not.

Oh. I've been here for three years apparently! Wow. Time flies and all that.

@terdon Yes, it does.

Member for 5 years, 4 months on SO. I think that was the first one I joined.

I'm mostly not that active on SE, really.

@FaheemMitha there are plenty more who don't post often

@Gilles Oh? Well, I don't know of them.

data.stackexchange.com/unix/query/371101/…

Apart from Stephen Kitt, none of the ones who mention it explicitly in their profile have been very active.

@Gilles Oh. Thanks.

@Gilles Yes, I see that.

I see Raphael Hertzog has answered one question here.

I think now's not a good time for me to add Debian Developer to my profile.

Most of these people seem to have wandered in here, answered a few questions, and then lost interest.

Apart from Stephen, that is.

anyone know which javascript sites you have to enable on SE for captcha to work?

@cas I'm pretty sure that there's a thread on Meta Stack Exchange with this information

doesn't matter now. i logged in to data.stackexhange and now i can run queries without captcha.