I added the last sentence to ensure that you realized that I did want to understand your view, and that you did not (understandably) think my question was sarcastic. Thank you for answering the question seriously.
What is the entire point and motivation of trolling? To cause discord and disruption.
By deleting legitimate threads just because one post (which happens to be the first in the thread) is from a banned user you are playing into the troll’s hands. You are disrupting and discording! You are F’ing TT. You’re giving them publicity.
The best solution is to delete their ass and don’t say a word about it. You’re just drawing attention to them by doing this. And in the process you’re disrupting legitimate discussions that law-abiding users are engaged in.
This is a dumb policy. Punish the violators, not the rest of us.
I wonder this, as well.
check your mail.
Couldn’t you get the same end – removing any psychic payoff to the troll – by simply changing the names of each discovered troll to some standard ‘house name’? Something as mundane as ‘anonymous’ or more pointed ‘nobody important’? (Apologies if those are actual user names.)
The post can live on, and people can discuss the topic, but where’s the please to any particular troll if their messages just end up mixed together with those of every other troll and sock into a blank morass of “anonymous”?
Thanks. I wouldn’t have made that connection.
Or “Hosiery”.
Or “Hoser”.
That’s what normally happens but in this case we had someone with 2000+ posts, which merits a public announcement.
How would you know? Have you been trolling somewhere?
(Forgot the smilie.)
You mean like this? You almost got the handle right 
(bolding mine, of course)
I agree. I think that the disruption caused on the Boards by all deleting of threads and messages – not to mention the extra workload on the Mods and Admins – probably do more to get the Trolls off than leaving their contributions to sink off the front page. If it’s a thread started by a Sock/Troll, or just too egregious to live, lock the sucker and watch it sink.
Cite?
In other words do you have any evidence at all for that statement? (Wishful thinking doesn’t count.)
I like the idea of simply changing the name to a standard one, but I’m not so sure it’s actually simple. I don’t believe that you can have duplicate usernames and I’d guess that merging the posts from two names is a bit of work. And renaming them Banned user #123456, Banned user #123457, etc doesn’t seem quite right.
But I do think CKDH has done the right thing by telling us all in the first place.
That’s too nice:
tehsuxxorbbc, tehsuxxorbbd, tehsuxxorbbe…
Yep. Past experience with a variety of trolls. No one method is best for dealing with all trolls, but in our experience, trolls love to come back and sniff their little…droppings. We have logs of who visits, when, and what they did, though generally we don’t read them. Obviously, this isn’t something I can link to.
We’d have to merge users in order to give them all the same name.
Normally, the amount of disruption caused by the disappearance of a troll’s posts is minimal. We usually catch them fairly quickly. And we try to be careful in our disappearing process. We are certainly aware of the general membership, and we can be selective in what disappears and how. For instance, sometimes retaining the thread title but eliminating the initiating post accomplishes the goal without disturbing the thread itself.
And our experience has been that this does serve to discourage most of our repeat offenders. Some of them value the friendships that they think they are making on our boards, and we trust that those friends are annoyed at them when their identities are exposed: basically, it was based on fraud, which isn’t a great basis for online friendships, one would suppose.
I do hope this was intentional on your part.
As to the policy, I guess I am confused as to what that means when she was the OP. How do you delete a thread but leave other poster’s posts, as Dex said was the plan? Also, I’m not sure that the rules for trolls necessarily fit this one. There can be, and in this case there certainly seems to be, a difference between the motivations of a sock and a troll. While a sock is against the rules, why damage threads by applying a rule to thwart motivation that was not there?
Fair enough. In that case the present policy is understandable.
Well, try: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=316836
… tell me that you feel all disrupted and disoriented because the initial post ain’t there? I’d say that you wouldn’t have noticed.
Or: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=329364
I would like to know who her previous incarnation was, too, if I’ve been around long enough to know that incarn.
Even if you did “forget the smiley”, this statement elicits eight-thousand rolleyes here. That’s a terribly backwards argument. You’d know that trolls don’t tend towards long attention spans because trolls have the Ritalin nature, period, whether or not you’ve ever trolled.