I’ve seen a couple of people with the “BANNED” under their name
Just for my own curiosity, all persons with that under their names are actually banned, right? I mean, no one has that as a joke title, correct?
I ask because I’ve seen a couple of posters that posted just recently that I can’t believe was banned, and when I look through their post histories, it doesn’t look like they posted anything worth banning them for.
I don’t remember seeing anybody who has “BANNED” as a custom title, but we don’t keep track of who has what title. Can you remember anybody who had that title or status?
That sounds awesome and I’m totally calling dibs on it.
I’ve seen it a couple of times too, but alas, my memory is for crap.
Recently there have been a lot of zombie threads and I’ve seen a bunch of banned posters in them, many of which I don’t even remember. Is that what you have been seeing?
Awww shucks.
I have seen someone with BAND as their custom title though…
I’ve noticed a number of ‘BANNED’ titles in zombie threads, like Loach, so I suspect that may be a large part of the problem: the number of zombie threads shambling back onto the first page of forum lists.
To answer YogSosoth’s quetion: *all persons with that under their names are actually banned, right? * – the answer is technically no, substantively yes. Lowering the “ban hammer” invokes the ‘BANNED’ tag as a software function. However, the way staff suspend posting privileges for seven or 30 days or whatever is to ban the member, then unban them after the suspension period. Customarily they will alter the software-generated ‘BANNED’ to ‘Suspended’, but they are of course only human, and for the suspended either (a) you’re seeing the tag after the banning and before the alteration, or (b) someone forgot to do the recoding of the title – both have happened and been mentioned in ATMB threads. However, 99.99% of the time someone displaying the ‘BANNED’ tag is in fact banned.
You’d be calling dibs on something that has been going on for years on many other forums.
I think the last person I saw it was Captain Midnight who had activity last on 12/30/10 (according to his profile). Noticed this in the Pit thread about Ugandan newspapers outing gays, post #20. Maybe I’m confusing him with a different captain (there are a lot of them!) who posted just recently
They may be banned not because of anything they posted that was bannable, but because they were sock accounts.
Ah, yes. THAT Captain. He was indeed banned back in early November of last year. You could search ATMB for an explanation.
While he has promoted himself(in his own mind) to Major Midnight(thus the activity you saw in the last few days), his half-life is rather short.
Sometimes we remove the threads/posts that they are banned for, and you won’t see those posts or threads. Neither will I, if I’m not signed in. Only staff can see them.
Just out of curiosity, how many posts were there in the Vick thread? After a certain point it seems a waste to lose all those posts for a troll, especially one who isn’t advocating extreme positions.
There were 48 replies.
However, I would have removed the thread anyway, because it was a troll thread. Keeping it in view would only reward trolling.
That’s too bad - it was shaping into something interesting.
I know the official answer is to just start a new thread on the same topic, but I highly doubt it would get much traction, since the participants probably wouldn’t re-post their prior thoughts, so the discussion would die rather quickly.
Is there any thought, on a thread that’s turning interesting, to just banning the troll, and letting the thread continue? If it’s just something like “All Jews should melt” then who cares, but that thread had real discussion in it, and I was looking forward to getting back to it the next morning.
On occasion, I’ve seen some zombie threads(tend to be very old threads) where there are usernames missing. Would it be possible to remove the troll’s username and let the thread continue?
The threads that display without user names are from our earliest days. Some glitch in the system truncated the posting, removing the name. We’ve never been able to figure out why. It has’t happened again (so far). It was not anything we deliberately did to the thread but rather a malfunction in the system.
I figured that, I thought it might be a way to do it deliberately.