I was thinking that every time they ban someone, they have a big party where they burn the poster’s database records and dance around the flames chanting, “We’re the best! Our users suck!”
Let’s have a banning party! With hookers, and drugs, and alcohol! In fact, forget the banning part!
That makes more sense. Who shall we ban next?
Don’t they work from home? What kind of unpleasant conditions are we talking about? Does Samclem live in Burma and we weren’t told? If so I’m all for setting up a fund for him.
Are you sure??
I’ve been a member here since 1999. In that time I’ve been Pitted, I think, eight times:
Jesus Bricker, you just can’t stop, can you?
and
God DAMMIT Bricker, Just for once admit you were WRONG ! by **Cartooniverse **
I pit Bricker by denquixote
Why won’t Bricker come out and play? by Dinsdale
Bricker is a disingenous punk. by you with the face
Bricker: This is not a good debating technique by John Mace
What are you getting out of all this, Bricker? by Blalron
Bricker: Got A Second? by Hamlet
(Unless you mean “Pitted” to refer to any mention of my name in a Pit thread title, even if the intent of the thread towards me is positive. That would be silly, right?)
How many times have you been Pitted?
tomndebb was the second poster to the thread and the first mod on the scene. He said that WeeBairn made some admission about multiple accounts on a paid site. He didn’t. He just admitted to multiple free e-mail accounts for the purpose of pranking. That was enough to get a mod to check him out, which is fine. It’s not a civil rights issue. I don’t care that he was banned-- he had socks, he got caught, them’s the breaks. But when Q.E.D. pointed out that what tomndebb said was misleading (and it was; I found it quite confusing until it was explained later by other mods), he got a lot of shit from several people. THAT is what I have a problem with-- no one would acknowledge tom’s inaccuracy (still won’t), nor that some unfair attacks had been made on the person who pointed it out.
Those bemoaning mod abuse in this thread… really? I don’t see it. Questioning, disagreeing, wanting people to explain, wondering how things work-- this does not equal abuse. Seems like most of the abuse has been from staff towards Q.E.D., with a little on the side for others. Q.E.D. is unpopular, so it’s OK, right? And they are just posting as posters, not mods, though they are also posting as mods at certain points, so… yeah, whatever.
Don’t you think you’re making a mountain out of a molehill? I doubt that would happen that often.
And either way, if people do try the above, well hey-it’s at their own risk.
:dubious:
I say release the names-it keeps threads like this from popping up, and I think it kills the whole mysterious conspiracy, mods are liars, blah blah blah.
Someone posts under a sock, and they get exposed-tough shit. That’s their problem-not ours.
Positive.
Three times. Twice a month or two ago and once three or four years past.
I would guess that ‘unpleasant conditions’ could include having to deal with a multi-page trainwreck of a thread in which accusations of mod lying and abuse of power are thrown around when they’re just trying to do their damned job.
It’s not a job, it’s a hobby. Really, get some perspective.
My guess is that it would only have to happen once and it could threaten the board. The bean counters at the Reader might care about that.
Plus, it’s just kind of a dickish thing to do, in a way. Someone breaks the rules because they need to get something horrible off their chest anonymously, or seek help that they don’t want others to know about. So they get banned, which is fair. But to then have that secret revealed to all seems a little unnecessary, and potentially very damaging to the person, out of all proportion to the offense.
And it doesn’t have to be something morally questionable where you might say, “hey, he deserved it.” What if the poster has a parent who is being controlling and overbearing, and that parent reads the SDMB. So the poster creates a sock to talk about how horrible the parent is being, gets booted, and the mods tell everyone, including the parent, exactly what this person said while the person thought they were being anonymous.
Or an under-age person creates a sock to ask whether or not she should tell her parents about an abortion. Sock is discovered, and the parents get to find out about the abortion.
It just seems to me that this is a dangerous area, both legally and morally. Sorry for your curiosity, but if it were me, I’d stick to the rule that sock identities aren’t to be revealed.
Ding ding ding!
This will probably turn into a semantic argument about “unpleasant” in a second, but the worst-case assumptions you see in threads like these are unpleasant to read. It’s part of the job, so… eh. But people here can be quick to leap to assumptions about Nazism and abuse of power.
tomndebb’s statements were wrong, either deliberately or by accident. If it creates unpleasant conditions to point that out, then of course the job is extremely unpleasant if anyone dares to question him. Arguably, however, conditions were much more unpleasant for the person who pointed out that tomndebb was wrong. Reread the thread and see who is the target of the most nasty comments here. It is not a mod. The mods (and there were a hell of a lot of them in this thread) as a group doled out much more nastiness than was directed at them. But as I said, any time moderating decisions are questioned, people come in and deride the questioners for daring to question. Oh well.
OK. The only thing I’d mention, then, is that you’ve got three in five years - .6 per year - and I’m at 1 per year.
There’s no question that I thought – and think – you were wrong, wrong, and wronger in this thread. Don’t take this as a general declaration of war; I was sincere in what I said earlier that in the next thread, if I agree with you, I’ll have no hesitation in saying so.
Before it turns into that I’ll just mention that I was joking. Maybe this will help 
I just brought it up because when I read that I had a mental picture of the mods chained to their computers in a Chicago Reader sweatshop.
FTR I thought the circumstances about the banning were quite clear, Tom’s reply was not misleading to me and the rest is just quibbling about one or two words that could have been substituted in a post or two.
And I have been very critical of certain things going on here lately. This is not one of them.
My new wall clock has a really annoying tick.
Actually, I don’t think he was wrong. The way I understand it is that Tom was answering Cisco’s very specific question (“Why was WeeBairn targeted for an investigation and not me?”). Unfortunately he didn’t c&p the question in his answer and many people (including me, at first) thought that he was addressing the larger issue, which was “Why was WeeBairn banned?”
Given the correct context, his answer: “I was not involved in Wee Bairn’s demise, but I note that your “similar” comment simply asked about signing up at a free site with fake info, not subscribing multiple times under different IDs.” was not wrong. At worst it was accidentally misleading. Sometimes c&p is our friend.
Don’t you think that reply seems to say that WeeBairn DID mention subscribing multiple times under different IDs? Especially since tomndebb went on to say, “Wee Bairn made a point of (rather gleefully) asking if everyone had not created sock puppets for malicious purposes. This (paid) site has an explicit rule regarding multiple usernames.”
WeeBairn didn’t do that. He never mentioned multiple user names or said anyting about being on the SDMB with socks. I’m not defending WeeBairn, just saying that tomndebb’s representation of what he said is not accurate, or to be more generous, is misleading . Could be accidental, and probably was.
Except that they weren’t. You made a leap of logic in interpreting his words (admittedly, not an unreasonable one) but the plain text of his post does not contain any inaccuracies. What he said in his post is exactly what happened: Wee Bairn admitted to using sock puppets (defined as creating a false persona for the express purpose of fucking with people) on another cite. This led to Marley checking to see if he’d used sock puppets on this cite. The only problem with tom’s post is that he didn’t specify that the admission of creating sock puppets was done somewhere else. Likely, because he thought that would be clear from the context of the discussion. And for some people, at least, it was clear. If it wasn’t for others, than at worst, he’s guilty of being a bit ambiguous. But he wasn’t wrong in the slightest.
Well, you can like her, but I’m not crazy about her. Is that OK?
(Hey, I figure if I’m reading through all this, I may as well have something useful to add :D)
I think your example illustrates why it’s in everyone’s best interest to allow the Mods to take care of business as they see fit. Hard and fast rules (a la common Three Strikes laws) don’t really serve anyone well. I’ll admit that I haven’t given a great deal of thought what would motivate someone to create a sock (ha!), but there’s obviously more than one. And while some are relatively innocuous, others are not. If someone wants to talk about an abortion they had, for instance, then that’s one thing. (And revealing their UserName would be quite dickish.) However, if someone wants to create multiple socks in order to invent a non-existent cheering section for his own argument in a heated debate, that’s quite another. Not only should he be outed, but he should be ridiculed.
Has there ever been a case where a poster has created a sock with the blessing of the Mods? If I come down with a nasty case of venereal warts, could I appeal to a Mod to allow me to post anonymously so that my stellar reputation may remain intact?