I was gonna ask this question there, but with the thread locked, I couldn’t. Why do we disappear a sock’s threads if the thread in question is promoting discussion, AND the questions posed by the sock are non-inflammatory in nature?
It seems to me to be a huge overreaction; an actual “nuke the poster from orbit” response, if you will.
It just seems like we’re terrified at the thought that a sock could be giggling away in his mom’s basement / posh hotel / Nigerian Internet cafe / whatever other stereotype we can think of, and I guess I’m of the opinion that it really, in the greater scheme of things, doesn’t matter. Let 'em laugh, I’ll never know the difference. I guess the easy response to this is that attention is what they want, but again: it’s a meaningless amount of attention, and once they’re banned / do whatever they socked up to do, they got what they wanted. Why kill innocuous threads afterwards?
Please note this is not intended as a criticism. I’m a huge fan of the boards, and I’ve got no skin in the game when it comes to running this place, so it’s easy for me to toss out questions like this.
If a sock starts a topic you’d like to see discussed, and the thread disappears, feel free to start a new thread on the same topic.
Easy peasy.
Also – we don’t necessarily dele all a troll’s threads – it depends on what the threads are, how much activity there is in them aside from the OP, etc. I recently banned someone for trolling, but only closed about half of the threads s/he had started because the others had healthy conversations going on that there was no reason to cut short.
It’s intended as a deterrent. If a sock sees all his posts disappeared, he may decide it’s not worth it to create a new sock. We don’t have all that many multiple returnees. In this particular case, the sock also had a semi-obscene trollish username.
As twickster says, if you find the topic of a disappeared thread interesting, you are free to start a new one.
The only problem with starting a new thread is, theoretically, there were a number of comments that were made that are now gone, and so the new thread won’t have those comments. Perhaps the people will return and remake them, perhaps not.
I say theoretically, because given the number of times we have “-gry” threads or “whole nine yards” threads resurface with exactly the same arguments repeated, I get the feeling it shouldn’t be too hard for good comments to show back up. YMMV.
Exactly. It punishes the other posters in an attempt to snub the sock. Couldn’t you just lock the thread, so that people could still see the other arguments?
And seeing as you have actually kept threads from socks and trolls active, can someone do a comparison to see whether doing anything actually accomplishes anything?
Finally, surely you’ve noticed that the number of threads that are ever restarted is rather low, especially compared to the number of times a thread will continue once the OP is banned.
Well, seeing as how what they are trying to accomplish is discouraging socks from returning and denying the sockster a peek back at his handiwork, ISTM that only a mod/admin could see the effect by checking IP logs. To me, it seems unlikely that it has much effect on the former. It’s like a game, and some will tire of it immediately some will be relentless. Also, some are trolls and some are merely people determined to keep posting here.
