Under the prime directive of “Don’t be a jerk,” just close down the nutter and trollish threads very early on, or move them to the Pit early on. There’s no need to parade pages of trash as if it has some value.
And if they pollute the Pit, but the jury is still out, confine them to a Giraffe Box. (In a perfect world, you could confine them to Giraffe’s actual Box without telling them, while putting them in Coventry on the SDMB, but vBulletin does not work that way.)
If it was that easy to catch on to them, then the fact that they were/are so damn prevalent would have been discovered long before the election happened.
This is probably the best idea of the bunch, other than simply ignoring it as several folks just upthread have suggested. Label the junk as junk and put it in the junkyard for the junkyard dawgs to gnaw on.
On a lighter note, what does anyone think about this thread: Fiance is questioning my committment for keeping my name.? It starts reasonably enough: a plausible scenario written in complete sentences then asking for advice. Folks respond by providing advice, relating personal history etc. As normal. As often happens, over the next 3 days and 2 pages the OP never returns to comment further.
Then in post #85 Vinyl Turnip discovers that somebody using the same username as here posted a thread a couple months ago to a different messageboard also about LTR / engagement / wedding drama, but with “facts” that contradict what’s in our thread.
Then in post #89 ToughLife discovers the OP’s text on our board is a direct verbatim cut and paste from a 4-year old post on a third messageboard / advice column by a user with a different username.
What if anything ought to be done once these discoveries came to light? I don’t think a warm welcome is necessarily what a poster like this deserves.
An interesting side observation is that under the TOU by posting anything to the SDMB you give copyright away to them. Or at least grant SDMB the right to redistribute your words without compensation to you.
Which implies (at least to me), that you need to have the rights to what you post in the first place. I would not be surprised to find the site ToughLife found thinks that they already own the rights to those words. Which IMO places SDMB in an awkward position.
Agony aunt letter by a first time poster? 101 it.
Except that they weren’t prevent. Not then, not now. We’re talking about this MB, remember.
We certainly are, and what is likely as not to happen here if someone is suspected of being a plant is people will pop up to defend the suspected plants from the evil/overreacting Mod Overlords.
OK, I’m not even sure what you objection is. I was responding to someone who is worried about this place becoming overrun with bots. If it got even close to that point (dozens or hundreds of new posters suddenly appearing and posting fake news), we would notice it. This isn’t Facebook. Comparing the SDMB to social media,* in toto*, doesn’t make sense.