Noticed this recently in a resurrected thread on the ownership of the UN building:
Are we now taking spam/bot posts and saving them elsewhere? Maybe we have always done that, but I always percieved “being whisked away to the cornfield” to mean deleted.
If I recall a prior comment on this, sometimes a mod will split and group a number of spammer or troll posts (sometimes from multiple threads) all into one thread and then cornfield that thread. But IANAM.
Obviously the mods will show up with the correct answer, but my understanding is that the ‘cornfield’ is just a hidden forum.
Yes, I see that happen frequently.
The end results can sometimes look a bit weird, after posts are missing in a thread. But it’s a necessary evil.
Yes. That is what happened in this case.
Correct.
We also have the option of deleting the post but leaving it in-place. Which one we do depends on circumstances.
It’s less a cornfield and more a weed-strewn parking lot littered with broken bottles and used condoms.
I’m sure that everyone get’s the classic Twilight Zone reference to the cornfield, but yeah, I imagine it a place of more mundane, and less unearthly horror.
My best image of it is comparable to the many superfund sites in the US: Toxic beyond belief, with many individual moments of lost beauty and potential (from the posters responding to said trolls with epic snark, or posting to threads with quality despite it’s tainted origins), but far, Far too costly in terms of time, money, and energy to likely ever rehabilitate.
ETA - I do believe though that once another poster in the Trolls thread linked to the gif from classic Ren n Stimpy of a dimension largely full of smelly gym socks and @What_Exit calling that a fair description…
The mods should open this forum every year on halloween for one day for us to roam through just for fun.
Heh, I could see that as long as it was in “read only” mode, but knowing us, we would not be able to stop ourselves from creating a discussion thread, which would inevitably lead to chaos. And some threads are thrown to the clowns for outright hate speech, scams and spams, while the creators of which deserve to meet Pennywise in a nice quiet sewer.
Or, like Pet Cemetery, someone would find that one gleaming thread that deserves, really and truly to come back, despite how horribly tainted and twisted it’s return would inevitably be.
Perhaps, but “wishing it to the abandoned shopping mall” just doesn’t carry the same cachet.
The old haunted amusement park?
Seriously, it is mostly just moldy and rank socks slowly composting.