Okay, here’s something that I just can’t seem to get used to. Posters who are banned who continue to show up in a thread. Specifically, I see their name and note it says “banned”, then continue to read their later posts below. I know, it’s an artifact of the way the board works, when they get banned, the title is retroactively added to prior posts. Still, it’s unsettling - I think they’re gone, but have to keep reading their stuff.
Would it be possible to put a date in the “banned” field, so it tells when they were banned? Then you could compare that to the post date.
Okay, probably would introduce new problems. I just wanted to whine.
[/irrelevant post that probably shouldn’t have been made]
Well, I’m curious as to how much leeway the Straight Dope computer-types can do with regards to adding features to the board…
If it were reasonably possible, I think it’d be nice to have banned names show up in red text (or something like that), just so you don’t miss the fact that they ARE banned.
If a banned poster was banned because he/she was essentially suspected of being a previously banned poster under another name, it might be helpful to see on the profile, username field, or elsewhere, which other names this person might have used. This might help to more easily identify a “newbie” who is actually a banned poster under a new name (easier to link writing styles, patterns, etc.)
Sometimes it’s meaningful, sometimes it’s not. For example, in the last little episode we lived through, all the names were newly created and there were so many you’d need a scorecard to fully tell the story. (It wasn’t a cast of thousands but it was a lot.) Not that there’s even that much story to tell, it’s “they had a buncha screen names that they used to harass other people and now they’re gone.”
Most of our people figure out the deal pretty quickly in these kinds of circumstances anyway, they can detect the legitimate Teeming Million from the I’m-just-here-to-annoy-you kind of poster.
Doesn’t sound like you took it that way, but my above suggestion certainly wasn’t meant as a criticism. I haven’t even come remotely close to complaining about any administrator or moderator. In the short time I’ve been here, I’ve been treated quite well by the admins and mods. (only problem so far is the occasional slowness of the message board)
My suggestion above was more to allow someone who suspected someone else of being a troll or banned poster to look at the grouped names and say, “Hey, this Sentinel guy sounds a lot like the old Mark Serlin poster”, etc, etc., and call that to your attention.
I agree that in the most recent spate of trolls/banned posters, most of them were detected fairly quickly as it was.
Anyway, just would like to give my kudos once again for the fine job you guys do!
