You got us! We’re just fucking with you. 
Wait! One alternative theory–you’re a paranoid, delusional Moron.
[sub]Hey! It’s just a theory.[/sub]
I don’t care. I’m not at all interested in picking apart the exact wording tomndebb could or should have used in his initial post.
My irritation with Q.E.D. has nothing to do with him being right or wrong, but with the prickish tone which infuses just about every post he makes, at least in the Pit. This is the umpteenth time I’ve seen him acting like a bitchy little douchebag. I mostly ignore it, but this time it got under my skin so I called him names. What can I say, it makes me feel like a big man.
I honestly, literally couldn’t care less what you think. Honestly. We could pretty much replace all your posts with a :rolleyes: and it would have about the same impact and utility.
Wow, another incredibly mature, reasoned response from the staff! No one should question us lest we call them nasty names! Go away, samclem, unless you can contribute something other than name calling to this thread. Or just go on deploying the rapier-like wit which we’ve come to love about you. You’re only making the staff look worse here.
[Cartman] MOD FIGHT! [/Cartman]
Come on, Giraffe. It wasn’t poor wording. It was flat-out wrong. Q.E.D. called tomndebb on it and was accused of poor reading comprehension. Q.E.D.'s tone was certainly less needling than samclem’s last post to me was. Yet you flipped out on him. Whatever your personal issues may be, Q.E.D. was right and tomndebb was wrong. The mod pile on does not make that any less true. All the tough talk does not make this situation less weird to me either.
Just have to say, to a man, the mods in this thread have not behaved in a way that does this board proud. I know, you couldn’t care less what I think, I’m a moron, etc. Nice way to treat your membership, but then, what do I expect? Call all the names you want, bullshit all you want, don’t tell us things, whatever. If you think you all have conducted yourself appropriately, then there’s something wrong here.
And yet you felt the need to storm in here waving your dick around despite the fact that nothing I said here had any relevance to you. Yeah, ok, whatever you say, Chief. You don’t care; gotcha.
Well, squabbling personalities and the overall atmosphere of a seventh-grade girls’ locker room aside…I think this is an excellent question, and one which I was just about to pose myself.
I too would like to know who I’ve been talking to since 2006 who was really Wee Bairn. (Or was it just a succession of Guests, in which case never mind?)
And I really don’t understand why it should be some deep, dark secret that we should all have to e-mail a mod to find out. The circumstances of NightRabbit were dealt with openly, as someone upthread pointed out. And I’m not going to stress the server even more tonight by firing up the Search engine, as I’ve already had three timeouts, but IIRC the whole affaire Jarbaby was dealt with fairly publicly. At least, I don’t recall any deep, dark secretiveness about it. And I can remember other sock puppeteers whose socks were openly acknowledged.
And Wee Bairn, for better or worse, definitely had an impact on the community. A lot of us spent a considerable amount of time talking to him, or at least listening to others talk to him (I actually thought his last GD thread was a complete hoot, I haven’t enjoyed lurking in GD so much in a long time), and we’d like to know who else he was. C’mon, guys…give. 
I guess it’s your right to be suspicious if you want, but I really don’t understand why you are. Investigating if someone is a sock isn’t a big deal. It doesn’t take much to make us have a look – a reported post, a couple of similar posts, whatever. Most of the time, it comes to nothing. Sometimes we find clear evidence that someone is a sock and we ban them.
In this case, the thing that started the whole thing was a post by the poster himself, which is actually pretty rare. Usually socks try to lay a bit lower than that. It actually wasn’t at all germane to the banning, except for the fact that it was one of the rare times that the catalyst was so public, which I suspect is why it was mentioned.
As for telling you who the socks were, I’m guessing if we do it’ll take some discussion on the mod loop first. (Despite the rumors of wagon circling and general conspiracy, we are about the most loosely coupled disorganized group I’ve ever been associated with. Not a bad thing, but any sort of group decision is much like herding cats.) I know that historically we’ve avoided publicizing too much about socks. I suspect it’s at least partially to avoid helping serial socks know which accounts we’ve figured out and how we noticed them.
Call me on what? I made those posts as a poster, just like anyone else. There was no hint of official warnings or implications, just me expressing my feelings. (I rarely do this, because I am composed of almost nothing but bile and misdirected rage.)
Ahhh, there’s your problem. You think they’re valid questions.
I’m honestly amazed you haven’t grokked the idea that the mods don’t have to follow police procedure. They don’t have to demonstrate probable cause. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve caught socks because two names used a common word. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve gone “Huh, I wonder if this guy has sock accounts” with…wait for it…no prior justification! It doesn’t matter why a mod decided to investigate. What matters is that they found something when they did.
Honestly, though, all your ‘suspicions’ have been addressed already, short of tom explaining himself, and again, he’s wholly irrelevant to the actual ban. Taking what he said and using it to try to build a case that this was an unfair banning is, quite simply, either very retarded or very biased.
We already know how they were found. The sock will know which accounts were uncovered by virtue of them being banned. So…?
OK. Feel free to keep arguing about it. I’m not getting involved, because I really don’t care. If tomndebb said something wrong initially, whatever. It happens.
You know what, this is bullshit. I was perfectly polite when I tried to clarify the situation with Wee Bairn. And I sure as fuck didn’t sign up to be a mod so I can have people sigh and shake their head any time I want to get pissed at someone who is acting like a douche in the Pit. The day you all expect me to be nothing but the face of customer service is the day I hang up my mod hat. No thank you.
Not especially. He definitely wasn’t lying. Phrasing perhaps could be an issue, if you want to make it one, but I think he was answering the real question, not the disingenuous question. shrug Feel free to disagree.
Not that I know of. Any number of things make our eyebrows go up, and that varies from mod to mod. Do you think we should have rules as to when we can investigate and when we can’t?
Why? We’ve very rarely shared that information. Extremely rarely.
OK, fuck it:
Wee Bairn, aka
Gene Frenkle, aka
Jean Poutine, aka
Jacob Silj.
I think they were all guests, but I haven’t searched so I don’t know for sure.
I’m not saying it was an unfair banning. You have socks, you get banned. That’s 100% cool with me. I am curious if it was just that post that caused the banning. I’m assured it was. Weird, but OK.
tomndebb’s inaccuracy remains for him to explain or not explain. All the Q.E.D. hate that resulted from calling him on it was totally unjustified and wrong IMO.
Won’t he see that they’re banned? Don’t they have BANNED under their names now? And won’t he find out if he tries to log in as them? So how are you keeping it secret from the sock maker? Seems like you are just keeping it secret from us.
I was accused of “hating.” I don’t see any hate in any of my posts in this thread.
You, however, were hating on Q.E.D. That’s the point I was making. Has nothing to do with if you were posting as a mod or a poster. You were being hateful. You feel justified, eh, whatever, that’s your slapfight to have. But the bile in this thread has not come from me. Mostly, it’s been from mods to members.
But Giraffe, your post to me was quite polite and I appreciate your attempts at explanation. I hope you will put the question through the mod loop regarding telling us who the socks were and I hope you do decide to tell us. Thanks.
ETA: Yeah, while I was editing, Giraffe told. THANKS GIRAFFE. I really appreciate your honesty.
I don’t think that I’ve posted in one of these “questioning a mod activity” thread, because by and large I think that your actions are reasonable and most of the questioning is silly.
With that said, this is a bizarre trainwreck. Someone asks who the socks were (and honestly, I want to know too, because like everyone else I’d like to know who I’ve been talking to). And suddenly there’s this huge blowout fight and mods throwing random insults everywhere? What the hell?!?
Maybe you’re all just having a bad night. But it looks suspicious as all get out, guys. I’m assuming that it’s not actually some complicated conspiracy, but maybe you could take another look at what you’re saying from the outside?
ETA: I see that the sock names have been posted now, in the three minutes I was contemplating my wording, so thanks. But still - bizarre trainwreck.
No, I was just curious. That’s really my entire motivation in this thread, curiosity. That, and thinking that Q.E.D. was getting the shit kicked out of him for no really good reason other than personal grudges not relating to this thread. I am totally satisfied now with the information that was ultimately given. I don’t know why it had to be filtered through several pages of crazy first, but I’m just glad to have it. Thank you for answering my questions, Frank and Giraffe.
There was also Don Logan. So that’s five different accounts.
While this is not the only method we use, some of those accounts have virtually identical email addresses. (I’m not sure if he made them public, but imagine joesmith@aol, joesmith1@hotmail, jsmith@yahoo and joejsmith@gmail.) There is zero doubt that these are all the same person.
Fuck, this paranoia is a little ridiculous. Mods are Dopers, not Nazi reptiles from outer space. None of them are stupid or particularly authoritarian, and none are in a hurry to push the ban button on anybody. Even with that very clear proof I waited half an hour or an hour and asked for the group’s opinions.
Wee Bairn was not banned for admitting he had multiple hotmail accounts, nor was he banned to discourage people from using bugmenot (which I’ve used myself) or similar resources. He was banned because when I read his post, I wondered if the kind of dickhead who would brag about fucking with people that way would also be the kind of dick who’d create multiple socks on the Dope. I didn’t expect to find anything, but it turned out Wee Bairn was stupider than I ever guessed. He got banned entirely because he drew attention to himself with that post. Basically he’s the equivalent of that guy who walks past a cop talking about the great pot he’s been smoking and then gets frisked. Never would have happened if he hadn’t run his mouth off and it’s entirely his own fault, both for breaking the rules in the first place and for bringing his rulebreaking to my attention.
Thanks, guys, it’s appreciated.
I do remember participating in a thread with Jean Poutine and went to look for it, but it looks like the sock posts have been disappeared anyway.
And, this is gonna make your life better, how?
Would be kinda cool if they were, though.