A few days ago Curtis LeMay wanted some advice on how to pass himself off as British on another message board for a prank. I was enjoying the show and about to weigh in with some pointers (basically, “you won’t get away with it for five minutes”) when up pops you, mod panties a-bunch, and lock down the thread. Which makes it very strange indeed to see you asking how “a friend” should go about committing an illegal activity. I assume you have an excuse, and I also expect to see the wagons circling like them red varmints wuz paintin’ fer war agin, but let’s hear it. Entertain us.
Are you asking about Czarcasm’s closure of a thread, which he did as a moderator or his starting a thread (now closed) in a different forum, which he did as a poster? I’ll let **Czarcasm **speak for himself, but I’m not clear about your question.
I would be interested in his justification for closing the thread. It seemed like an odd reason. Suppose **Curtis **were going to a costume party and wanted to pull of a British persona. Would that have been OK? After all, he did say he was doing it as a joke, not to deliberately lie about his nationality.
Well, I guess the thread closure’s within his prerogative as a mod, no complaints there, but it seems odd that someone who’s closing a thread opened with the purpose of asking about an innocent prank should then start one of his own asking how to do something illegal - because if the first is against SDMB policy, I naturally assumed that the second would be too. Sorry if I was unclear.
I believe in you, Contrapuntal. As Goddess is my witness, I believe one day, I will see you in an ATMB thread, posting an example that is germane to the topic being discussed. One day!
What distinction are you trying to make here? He said he was going to lie about his nationality. It may have been a joke, or it may have been his idea to troll another board, but he didn’t say.
Edit: Other than that, I’ll let the mods involved handle this.
Was this really necessary? I would reply in kind but there is a rule against taking personal shots at moderators in this forum.
Did you even read the OP? Here, let me quote the ***germane ***bit.
“I’m trying to impersonate (as a joke not serious Identity theft or anything) as a British person on an another internet forum.”
Got it? Good. Now starting with “I’m”, count seven (7) words and tell me again he didn’t say it was going to be a joke.
So other than to give me a ration of shit, you had no reason to pop in here? Isn’t that against the rules?
About as necessary as yet another irrelevant analogy, yes. This kind of crap gets in the way, and it’s ridiculous.
Yes.
He says it’s a joke to differentiate it from identity theft of an actual person. (Only Curtis LeMay would think this distinction was necessary.) He doesn’t say if he was going to pretend to be British over there as a joke with posters he already knew, or if he was just going to lie about his identity for fun or to win arguments. It sounds more like the second one, based on what he says. You can see where we might not want to encourage that over here.
I popped in here because I’m surprised anyone sees a controversy in this. When someone starts a thread asking about how to do something illegal, the thread usually gets closed and that’s the end of that. If Czarcasm had asked how to do some kind of real-world equivalent to what Curtis LeMay asked - “how do I emigrate to the U.K. illegally?” or something - then I could see the contradiction.
First, asking for advice on how to troll another board is probably the first step towards board-wars, which we want no part of. I’m guessing that’s why that thread was closed. Had the question been “How do I dress up as a Brit at a costume party?” no one would have cared.
Second, the Cuba thread, I don’t believe Czarcasm was asking for advice on how to do something illegally, but how to do it legally. When the thread turned towards “it’s not legal,” it was closed.
(Sorry, I got interrupted whilst typing this and others have posted ahead of me.)
Then I’m going to ask you to cite these oh so many occasions that I have used irrelevant analogies, as well as retract your accusation when I can produce one relevant analogy, since you claim that has never happened.
Right. He says it’s a joke. You said he didn’t say that. He did say it. And since you did read the OP, it is clear that you deliberately misrepresented his statement. Please stop this kind of shit.
You really should just stop with these blanket accusations against other posters, at least in this forum. Isn’t that against the rules?
So he did say it was a joke, right? And you said he didn’t. Why can’t you just admit you were wrong?
What does that have to do with your post responding to me?
So playing a joke is trolling? Really?
Depends on what “playing a joke” means, doesn’t it? And how long it goes on. And exactly what the point of the joke is. “Playing a joke” about your identity is trolling. It’s saying things that you don’t really believe to get responses. We’ve had people here who have lied about who they are (profession, background, etc) and board members didn’t consider it a “joke,” but trolling. Someone starts a thread about an outlandish topics, get everyone all riled up… that’s trolling, isn’t it? If they then said, “Haha, I was just joking” does that make it any the less trolling.
And, asking advice about how to deceive people on another board – whether it’s trolling, or a joke, or a serious request for statistical information – is liable to lead to board wars.
Not that I really want to get involved in this argument, but I can see how Poster P and Moderator M could see the same behaviour as “playing a joke” and “trolling”, respectively. It would be just two views of the same thing. I think most trollers just think they are playing a joke, and therefore they don’t see why it is frowned on.
On the other hand, starting a thread on “How can you tell the difference between Americans and British on a message board?” would seem to be entirely proper.
You remember the entire “Why Was This Thread Closed?” thread last month?
Good luck with that.
I should have been a little clearer there. Here is what I was saying: Curtis LeMay said it was a joke, but he did not make it clear if he was going to be kidding around with other posters who knew who he really is, or if he planned to impersonate someone else for the purposes of trolling or just flat out lying to people. Neither one is identity theft, which is the other possibility he described.
A thread asking for advice on trolling or misrepresenting yourself on another board is going to get closed. I think that’s understandable: Czarcasm closed the thread because of that potential issue. I think it’s a separate issue from the GQ thread Czarcasm started.
I never said that. I drew a distinction between jokes and trolling, which indicates I don’t think they’re the same thing.
I think the point is the double standard. As a poster he started a thread which is against board policy, he should have known better, and his recent mod activities show that he does know better.
I’ll tell you what, Contrapuntal: while I think the Halloween comparison is really silly and not connected to the thread under discussion, I came off a lot harsher than I intended to in that post and the next couple. Mea culpa. I apologize for that.
Never mind.
How should he have known better? He asked if it was possible legally- found out it wasn’t and thus closure.
That’s saying you can’t ask a question HERE if you can find the answer somewhere else…
Ignorance was fought, and it happened to be a Mod’s ignorance this time around. That’s a good thing.
We can’t assume the mods automatically “know better” about legal issues on a variety of topics. On their realm of the boards, perhaps that’d be nice, but even then it’s not really a biggie.
He tried, and it was closed and it’s all good and done.
I don’t see why either thread had to be closed, personally. IIRC, the rule against starting board wars started when people actually started board wars, i.e. flooding other message boards in response to links posted here. Now, we’re shutting down discussions simply on the possible, remote chance that they’ll start a board war? That seems silly to me.
Same with inciting illegal activity. Obviously, we don’t the boards to be used for people to arrange to sell drugs or build pipe bombs or what have you – does that have to translate into forbidding discussion of anything and everything illegal? People break the law all the time, from speeding to smoking pot to cheating on their taxes to copying mp3s and software from their friends without paying for it. While the board should not endorse illegal activity, I don’t see the harm in taking a neutral stance on allowing discussions to proceed that are not going to cause immediate and/or direct harm and just letting people hash it out themselves.
It’s easy to let rules turn into dogma, where they have to enforced for their own sake, but I think it’s worth remembering why the rules were put into place and focusing on the spirit of the law, rather than getting bogged down by technicalities.
Forgive this deconstruction of a phrase you used idiomatically, but what *standard *is being doubled here?
- **Czarcasm **didn’t close the thread based on illegality, in fact he didn’t cite a rule at all.
The standard, as far as I can discern one, is: moderators get a certain amount of discretion in deciding what sorts of threads remain open in their forums.
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Then he started a thread as a poster in a different forum, moderated by other kids. I’m waiting for him to speak for himself about his reasons, but it’s a stretch to say that his starting that thread was inconsistent with the standard upon which the other closure was based. And while I agree with the closure in this case, it’s not as if we close every thread about Americans traveling to Cuba: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=11011449#post11011449
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Even if he had closed the thread based on illegality, knowing the board policy about illegality doesn’t mean he knew what he was discussing was illegal. He may have; or not. We won’t know until we hear from him.
For the record, I was the one who closed the GQ thread, since it appeared as if the activity being discussed might have been illegal. If the question had been clearly about legal ways to visit Cuba, I would have left it open. Since Czarcasm seems to have been offline since it was closed, we’ll need to wait for any clarification.
For what it is worth, and it may not be much, this thread is filled with a lot of what is going on around here now that accounts for my reluctance to participate much (outside of some sports discussions in the Game Room and an occasional Tolkein thread in the Cafe).
At least one moderator acting in total violation of what one would expect of the moderators here.
Non-moderators getting their knickers in a bunch and going off the deep end in the process.
An underlying behavior being discussed (official treatment of CurtisLeMay, hypocritical behavior by a mod, take your pick) which is not particularly what we would prefer to advertise.
I am by no means perfect, or even close. I have a short fuse at times. I can be snarky from time to time. But I can assure you that, were I on the staff as a moderator, I would adopt the following policy:
Don’t post snarky answers.
Don’t post answers about posts that get my blood roiled until my blood has cooled (to avoid the first part of the policy).
Don’t pre-judge posters, even if I’m quite certain they are being idiots/jerks/dillweeds/<insert favorite pejorative here>.
I’ve long since given up hope that posters here who are not on staff will give staff a break and not react like the staffer who has gotten them all het up should be pilloried and attacked with every missile at hand.
Just sayin’.