What not to do when someone is being rude, fighting, or trolling

A request from the admin team: If there's someone being rude and nasty, picking fights, saying things that break the rules, or just straight up trolling, please just report and/or mute. 

When you engage, it makes it harder for the admins to get to the bottom of it. When they check into a post and see 500+ comments of people being nasty to each other, there's no way of telling who started what, or if there's a pattern beyond "these people don't like each other."

All they see is a comment riot - and in any case, their job is to respond to rule breaking, not to act as arbiters in disputes between users. 

So, to recap:

If someone says something like, "I enjoy kicking puppies, people who don't kick puppies are stupid." 

DO: Report them.

DON'T: Get into a 500 comment fight with them about how their breath smells and how their kids are ugly. 

Thank you.