Isn’t this thread an example of that?
I have to agree with Giraffe here, in some instances, chew toys are a wonderful thing to share.
If I was a troll, I can’t think of anything that would give me more satisfaction than starting up a thread that gets hundreds of replies and tons of interaction, then have it get deleted into the cornfield.
I understand the reason you can’t just delete the troll’s posts themselves is that if you delete an OP, you delete the whole thread - is that right? Why not create a bunch of dummy OPs off in your special moderator forum, then move them to the troll’s forum, merge the two threads, then delete the troll’s posts? If you set a bunch of them up ahead of time, the dummy thread will be older, and therefore the first listed, am I correct?
A dramatic dropoff? I doubt it. I don’t think I’d read too much into a six month period one way or the other.
In any given year, we get a handful of threads like this one. In the thread that was removed, 91 posts were made in an hour. So as far as that goes, yes, trolls get less attention this way even if people ask what happened.
Side question: Why does the SDMB use “sock account” for “secondary account” regardless of how the sock acts? I was under the impression that a sock is like this:
Makes a sock puppet
Talks to sock puppet
Sock puppet talks back
Sock goes in the wash
I’m not questioning the rule of “one account per person,” that’s part of the Dope’s way.
OK, just once more, then I’ll drop it because this really isn’t a big deal. Call it a small-to-medium deal, enough to comment on but not jump on my sword over. 
So I’ve just logged on and opened a forum to check a thread I’ve been following, and – huh? It doesn’t seem to be there. I scroll up and down the ‘front page’ a few times to see if maybe I’ve overlooked it. Then I go to the second page, thinking perhaps a lot of new threads have pushed mine off the front. Still no thread. So I now go and do the same thing on a couple of other fora that I frequent, thinking “Well maybe it was the Pit, not GD…”. Still no thread. Finally, I check ATMB to see if there’s an announcement or anything referring to the thread. Still nothing.
At this point, having been around the block before, I can now be pretty sure what happened. Not certain, mind, but pretty sure. To go any farther I need to PM a mod, but if I do so the most I can get is to change “pretty damn sure” into “dead certain” and put finality to the earth shaking question “Troll? Or sock?”. So indeed, sending a PM at this point is purely academic. So typically I won’t bother. As I said, not a great big hairy deal, but at least an annoyance. And an unnecessary one, I believe.
Consider the preferred alternative scenario wherein I log on and look for that thread I’ve been following. It’s not there, so after scrolling up and down I click on ATMB and see a thread titled “Poster jerkweed banned for trolling/sockitude”. I open the thread and read “That’s right, jerkweed has been banned and his threads and posts deleted. Move along, nothing to see here.” So I do.
Are we really going to assert that this amount of “attention” (the announcement above) is going to bring jerkweed back like the Pied Piper was diddling his synapses? And that the allure of this tiny speck of attention is so powerful as to have an actual drawing power that is measurably greater than the current system? Especially when the current system seems to frequently result in confusion, questions in ATMB (“How do I find out what happened to…?” “Oh, you’re not supposed to ask, you’re supposed to PM…” “But if I were guessing, I’d guess sock because…”) and all the rest we see so frequently. Were I the sock/troll, I think I would find all this confusion and tangential discussion, all the circumlocutions and inferences, to be far greater evidence of my impact – and thus far more reward – than a one line announcement. But that’s just me.
I guess it’s because secondary accounts and sock puppetry are both banned here. These days we almost never get asock puppets (as in people arguing with themselves).
We are not going to really assert that because it would be an exaggeration of what I actually said.
The current situation doesn’t result in a lot of confusion. Compared to the number of people who get banned this way, we don’t get a lot of questions about it. People either ask once and learn how it works, or they see other people ask about it and learn how the system works that way.
No, not really. As I pointed out above, most deleted threads and posts get no notice at all (or else people realize what happened and don’t ask). clairobscur has admitted above that he started the original thread to ask about the thread disappearance because he forgot about the policy. (This thread was also unusual in that it named the troll who started the OP; even when a thread like this is started in ATMB it often does not name the troll, hence not really attracting more attention to it.)
This thread, although it was occasioned by the deleted thread, is discussing the policy in general. So it’s not related to the deleted thread specifically.
Actually, as has been alluded to several times above, our policy on deleting troll threads and posts is not rigid. On occasion, if a troll post can’t be removed without disrupting an otherwise valid discussion it may be allowed to remain. On rare occasions we have left threads started by a troll/sock open depending on the nature of the discussion.
In this particular case, the troll started a blatantly trolling thread in the Pit. The very first response was “Obvious troll is obvious.” Most of the following posts were jokes and ridicule. I think that a large majority of posters in that thread understood that it would eventually be disappeared, and their witticisms with it.
I think 6 months is actually a pretty long time for a test run of a policy. Rather than “doubt it”, do you guys keep any sort of record to see what is going on?
Or even just one troll/sock thread in ATMB or list elsewhere would do, locked for all but the PTB to add to. If a poster vanishes or is banned it would be handy to have somewhere to look and see an entry reading “jerkweed - sock” or “hairypalms - troll”.
Would that be feasible, or are the numbers of trolls and socks so great it would be flooded with names?
We keep a record of all our bannings.
I think you’re failing to understand what we did, and why. The only change in the last six months is that we lock the ‘what happened to this guy?’ threads and ask people to send us private messages. We didn’t change that policy because we expected it to make a dent in trolling or socking - we did it because our previous policy was inconsistent: we would tell people ‘don’t start a thread, ask a mod or admin,’ but when people started a thread instead of asking us, we would just answer the question. It didn’t make much sense and created no incentive for people to do what we were asking. The policy of not announcing bannings of socks and (short-lived) trolls goes back years and years.
In the case of an ongoing thread that is not going to be deleted altogether, why not replace the post with a notice that says something like what I said before – “This message has been removed by the board administration for a violation of the terms of use.” Or perhaps add a Moderator post subsequent to the deleted post.
This would avoid the current situation in the Commissar is a Troll thread, which is bringing up a weird error message when you hit the “view first unread” button.
But your policy is meant to keep all troll-sock talk off the board. Your shoring up of the policy furthered that. Therefore if the policy is effective this shoring it up would have had an effect.
There wasn’t really much point of shooting from the hip and saying you doubt it when you could have just looked, ISTM.
We can’t go back and replace the post with a note saying “post removed,” although we could take out the content and replace it with a mod note if we wanted. And we can add mod notes later to clear up any confusion.
The change was intended to make the policy more consistent (subsequent to this thread.) Nobody ever said it was going to reduce trolling. Although that thread does include an example of the kind of thing we are trying to get rid of.
I don’t see what you or I am missing here. The change was to make your policy more consistent. You don’t think that it would at the same time it would make the policy more effective? You merely changed it so no one would say “Hey, that’s inconsistent!”
Quoting from my own email at the time:
The issue was that we were telling people to send us private messages if they wanted to know why someone was banned without explanation or why a thread disappeared. But if they didn’t follow our instructions and asked in public, we just answered them anyway - so people had no reason to do what we asked. Now we’ve straightened that out. We’re no longer answering the question (in public) while discouraging people from asking them. Nobody on the staff ever said “'I bet this will reduce sock and troll activity 10 percent.”
Doesn’t sound like you guys had a very insightful conversation about it then. The policy is that you want less talk about trolls so as to discourage them. You guys decided to make it a firmer policy to not answer questions about trolls in public. And the problem is solved: our policy is now consistent. Don’t worry about how effective the policy is. I guess it’s just a given in the mod circle that of course it works.
The policy we’re using has been in place a long time, is well understood, and isn’t causing us any problems. (Once in a while someone either doesn’t know the rule or asks us to explain, but I’m not seeing that as a problem.) Considering what the internet is like I think we don’t have a whole lot of sock and troll problems. We can’t compare our policy to a control group SDMB with different rules, but it’s fine as far as I’m concerned.
I dunno. I think locking a troll’s thread is fine when it’s as obvious as the pit thread was. However, leaving the thread up for a few days like a body on the gallows, might not be a bad idea. Saves threads like this one, staff time, and sends a message to other villains that the ban hammer awaits them.
The other side of the coin is that the banned party probably gets a little woody when he sees all the excitement in ATMB caused by his escapades. To that end, the better choice might be to let the thread swing for a few days then bury it.
Well, one problem it causes is that annoys a number of people when perfectly good threads get deleted just so you guys can spank a sock. That’s kind of what this thread is about. I doubt you’d have too many problems with a less iron-fisted policy on sock started threads.
They’re trying to point out the ramifications of your proposal. If we do what you suggest, is that not the equivalent of this? Yes, it isn’t the words you used or the point you intended, but it is the result they project occurring from your proposal.
That’s a poor response, because several people feel the current system is broke. Of course, there may be different definitions of “broke” in play.
Historical legacy. Sock puppets are a type of secondary account - the most common kind and one of the more annoying kinds. It’s a catchy phrase. Ergo, the label stuck.