Guy posts spam or trolling or other blatant crap, and gets insta-banned. Seems to happen a lot around here. But it occurred to be to wonder about this:
Happens? Is there a modding policy for dealing with that?
This was today (8/9/2012) but there was another very similar just a few days ago – Someone who signed up YEARS ago but never posted a single solitary post for years, suddenly posts an OP with shit and gets insta-banned. Marley23 likewise thought that was odd. Could be someone got hacked?
OK, let’s be clear that I’m talking about insta-ban for spam or advertising, not bannings after repeated warnings for personal insults. Basically, we’ll listen if someone emails us about being banned. There are a number of situations that have come up; I don’t recollect anyone saying their account was hacked, but we have had people leaving their accounts open and awkward posts made by a sibling or teen with a nassssty sense of humour. We’ve had newcomers who didn’t quite understand the advertising rules. And other situations.
Basically, in unusual circumstances, we’re willing to listen to explanations. Sometimes those explanations are compelling; sometimes they’re credible; and sometimes they’re just phony.
We’ve all seen emails and Facebook messages from people whose accounts have been compromised. I’ve never seen it on a message board. And it definitely wasn’t the case with this guy in any event. He had a blog with the same name and the same messages. We do occasionally ban people for posts that look like spam but turn out not to be. If they want back in, they send emails to the webmaster and we’ll undo the ban.
But the blatant spammers almost universally sign up, immediately posts some spams then leave the forum never to return. So pretty much the only way your scenario would happen is if some innocent person joins and then within minutes their screen name is hacked by a spammer. Not too likely.
In Ovis Arie’s case, he joined four years ago and never posted. It’s most likely he looked around the site for an hour or so, maybe a few weeks, then never returned. In that case even if it was someone who hacked his password and posted the spam, the real Ovis Arie would never know about it.
I’m a moderator on another forum and several years ago we were hit with hackerbots that worked their way through the member list trying to log in as the various members. The vBulletin software blocks a user from logging in for some length of time (a half hour or something) after five failed log in attempts, so that would normally keep them out. But a certain percentage of folks use ridiculously easy passwords (like ‘password’ or ‘12345’ or their screen name :rolleyes:) so the hackers were able to get control of some of them and after laying low for a while proceeded to send spam private messages to other users.
As I recall all of the compromised screen names were people who hadn’t been to the forum in a long time, so the hackers may have gone after them specifically so the real people wouldn’t notice their screen names were taken over.
Yeah, but what’s the harm in banning in such a case? If the guy does come back and for some reason still remembers his username and wants to use it, he’ll just have to email a mod, just like he would have before. I’m sure the mods would listen.
And if he doesn’t want the same name, he won’t sound at all like the spammer and won’t be using the same IP, so there’s no danger of them being thought to a sock of the spammer.
Orly?
