A Bad Egg

About This Message Board
1

Prologue
When a long-standing poster is banned, we normally announce why, and leave their posts in place.

On t’otherhand, when we ban a spammer or troll or multi-identity jerk, we generally don’t bother to announce it. These people thrive on publicity, they get their jollies from trying to jerk us around, and we don’t want to give them any satisfaction.

We also usually cause their posts to “disappear.” For spammers and trolls, this is obvious, but for multi-identity people who try to sneak back in, the logic is perhaps a little less obviousl. Basically, we want them to understand that the cost of such playing around is that their history on our boards will disappear when they are found out. We hope that the removal of their posts will be an incentive for them not to bother again.

Sometimes, this causes minor inconvenience to other posters, to find that a thread has “disappeared.” The anger should be directed at the jackass who started the thread, knowing full well that would happen when they were discovered.

He finally gets to the point
In our current situation, Good Egg turned out to be a person who had been banned managed to sneak back in, and got away with it for a considerable time. She had a little over 2000 posts and had started over 200 threads.

It would be awkward (not to say time-consuming) to delete all those posts. On the other hand, that is the penalty. We are therefore deleting most threads that she started, but usually leaving the posts within threads, so as not to disrupt the space-time continuum more than necessary. In some cases, deleting her posts from the threads she started doesn’t cause any noticable gap.

Basically, we’re deleting as many as seem reasonable and appropriate, without pretending to try to get them all, on a one-by-one and forum-by-forum basis.

This is sort of the in-between case: on the one hand, her most recent identity was around for quite a long time. On the other hand, she’s a returning bannee (OK, banshe.) Basically, then, we would like NOT to give her the publicity of discussion of her case. We do not want to give her any more attention than is minimally necessary; she’s not worth it.

If you have any questions, please email a Moderator and we’ll be happy to answer you behind the scenes.

2

PS - I am leaving this thread open if you’d like to discuss the policy (as outlined in the prologue above). But please let’s not discuss the individual.

3

Not specific to Good Egg (but seriously, who’s surprised?), I simply don’t think this policy makes any sense. How many returning bannees are worried about their old messages? Like they want to preserve their SDMB legacy or something? It’s a needless difficulty for the admins, it’s confusing to the users, and it’s just not plausible that it actually makes any difference in the behavior of the banned.

Why did this take so long to figure out, anyway? A lot of people were suspicious; it’s not as though the idea had never crossed anyone’s mind. The two had very similar posting styles.

4

Who was Mal Ova in her previous incarnation?

Well, you brought it up.

5

I think this policy has resulted in more turmoil and disruption to the board. At least in this case enforcement of the policy penalizes the good members and has little or no effect (other than symbolic, I suppose) on the person you’re trying to penalize.

6

Ditto NicePete. This is not a good policy. Is it really worth it to kill and maim so many threads?

7

The SDMB has a long tradition of encouraging its users to NFTT. Deleting the banned users’ posts is the ultimate deterrant for FTT.

8

But is there any reason to believe it actually makes a difference? I suppose it’s like a magic rock that keeps lions away - “Well, do you see any lions?” “Um, yeah.” “Well, be glad I have this rock, then! Think how many there’d be otherwise!”

9

Given that trolls traditionally thrive on attention, yes. Thus the reson for DNFTT in the first place.

10

They tend to get plenty of attention while they’re here. (And I suspect, incidentally, that the “no calling people trolls” rule increases that, as it makes it harder to simply dismiss what appears to be trollery; the less perceptive dopers then flock and get all enraged and give them all the attention they desire.)

11

I have to say: your reasoning is good. But, in practice, rather than theory, most of them don’t come back. If their posts, and the outraged responses thereto, are not visible for them to revisit and chortle over, they tend to lose interest in trolling this board, and go somewhere the pickings are better.

This case is, of course, entirely different. What we have here is an innocuous, bland, and inconspicuous sock. You or I would be spotted quickly; you’d couldn’t stay away from linguistics and I couldn’t stay away from politics; neither of us could stay away from the Pit. This poster avoided previous hot topics, and thus it took longer for suspicion to arise.

Regardless, this poster knew that the policy of the SDMB is to remove the posts of socks, and knew that when she was spotted we would remove as many of her threads and posts as we possibly could. Any cost to the members of the SDMB that they feel they bear from this lies on her head.

12

Why not simply lock any active threads started by a troll and let them fade off the front page of whatever forum they’re in? Not bother hunting down individual posts unless they’re instigating a trainwreck or otherwise stirring shit? Even then, why not simply post a mod message in a thread that’s otherwise acceptable to the effect that So-And-So’s been banned for socking/trollery, so don’t bother answering that person’s posts?

This would seem to be a sensible approach for the sort of situation we have here, where the sock got away with it for an extended period and didn’t post anything suspiciously inflammatory. Summary execution and post-cornfielding for a blatant troll/sock who blazes in looking for a fight, well, that’s something else.

13

Completely agree. Silly policy, in which the minimal benefit is outweighed by the damage.

14

Right. DNFTT is encouraged, as I said, but getting people to practice it is virtually impossible.

15

Right. DNFTT has never been the practice of the SDMB, for better or for worse, and it’s highly unlikely that it ever will be. Further, the “no calling people trolls rule” makes such a thing essentially impossible, since those with suspicions have to keep them to themselves. All the wiping does, then, is erase the evidence that we’ve fed the trolls.

They’re trolls. It’s not like they’re doing it for posterity. I venture that none of them hope to show evidence of their crimes to their children later on. Since people rarely dig up threads more than a few days old anyway, the impact of deleting them after the fact can’t be imagined to be anything but minimal. And it’s a consistent annoyance to actual, non-troll members (whose use of the message board, in my view, ought to be a higher priority than a desperate but fruitless attempt to make trolls feel unimportant.)

16

Agree, ditto. Locking these threads would be a far better solution.

When the policy here, repeated over and over again, is to have flexible decisions so that individual circumstances can dictate the best course, why in the world are you falling back on “these are the rules” to justify a bad outcome?

17

If I were a troll, I’d love the ability to cause this much confusion and turmoil by coming back and starting a few long-running threads and posting a few much-discussed comments in othe threads, knowing full well what will happen when I’m eventually found out.

18

In what way is it a consistent annoyance if people rarely dig up threads more than a few days old? Seriously - I’d like to know your view.

19

'Course not. They do it for jollies and all they have to do to revisit their jollies is use an old email notification. But if the thread is gone…

20

When trolls and socks leave legitimate threads behind, it’s an obvious source of annoyance for those participating in the threads. Those legitimate threads are obviously not the ones that led to their banning anyway, and aren’t going to garner the type of attention trolls desire.

Blatant troll threads tend to be locked at very least anyway; disappearing them makes little difference I suppose (though some are fairly entertaining to read - and isn’t that essentially what we’re here for?)

The point is that in the rare circumstances in makes any difference - that is, in circumstances in which there are substantial numbers of relevant threads and posts that have stimulated productive conversation - disappearing causes the board harm. In the more common circumstances, those threads have already been locked or disappeared, so it makes little difference.

Again, it’s foolish in the extreme to imagine that trolls are revisiting threads to relive the glory days of their tenure on the SDMB - it’s not as though those types tend towards long attention spans. Meanwhile, in this particular incidence, I quite wish I could find an old thread in which Good Egg and I had an exchange, since if memory serves it contradicts a recent claim she made to me, but might have been interesting in the light of what little I know about her previous incarnation.

:dubious: Yes, I’d imagine you’re aching to hear it.