Completely agree with the OP.
Wow, I had no idea this was no policy. Dumb and counterproductive, no matter how well-intentioned.
Should make the various Verhoeven threads interesting to read, though…
Rename the user as “Teeming Million.” Do it to lapsed guest accounts, too. Put the user title as “Anonymous.” Unless the post in question is bannable, I don’t see the point of deleting it.
Also, I don’t go about reading old dead threads… but do they delete ALL of the old posts of the banned user, or just the one’s leading up to the banning? That’s going to seriously screw up the archives after a while.
From your mouth to the ears of …er, uh,…a Mod. Done.
Why replace Guest titles? I mean, it’s not like they’ve done anything wrong.
I think what you should do is just silently disable their accounts: maybe even cut the trolls off in the middle of compo
1010011010 are you suggesting that instead of <sock or troll name> they should get the “generic” name “Teeming Millions”, and lapsed accounts should get “Guest” not as a title, but as their name? That might not be such a bad idea for the socks/trolls, they wouldn’t get the noteriety, but the threads that were of interest would still retain their flow. I think maybe lapsed guest accounts should retain their names for a time at least, they might pay for an account later. Maybe after a certain time, when the name is going back up for grabs, then switch to “Guest” as a name?
I agree. It is very annoying to have any thread deleted. I can understand editing a post (say it contained illegal, or personal info) but to delete an entire thread is uncalled for.
I should add that you should keep the OP. Change the name if you must, but to delete the OP often ruins a thread, and it is just plain information that we all would like to have.
Don’t censor otherwise legal threads.
What about the assholes that pit these people? Should they be forgotten? Should they count their blessings? Should they just shut up?
what
I’d also point out that we’ve never had a policy of deleting threads if a legitimate poster winds up doing enough jerkish things that he gets banned. If someone racks up a few thousand posts and perhaps contributes a lot of interesting things to the boards, but he just can’t control his temper and keep from calling the people he doesn’t like bad names outside of the Pit, we don’t go back and yank all his old threads after he’s gotten a final warning and ultimately been banned. What we do is remove threads when the poster never had any business being here in the first place. Most of the time, y’all likely wouldn’t have any problem with that, unless you just get off on reading spam threads and pointless drive-bys by bored teenagers and the like.
The problem comes when we ban someone, and they keep coming back with new guest accounts. If all they ever do is post “the Mods are Nazis!” threads, then again, no one really notices when their threads die with them. However, sometimes these “boomerang” posters do manage to start a thread which actually turns out to be interesting (perhaps as much because of the other replies as because of the OP). In that case, the rationale for removing that interesting GQ question (or poll in IMHO or debate in GD or whatever the case may be) isn’t to punish everyone else who replied to or read that thread, it’s just that the person who started it is benefitting from the boards (by having their questions answered, or their points discussed, or just by seeing all the people replying to their thread), when by rights they should never have been able to post at all.
Being banned means you don’t get to post here anymore. We have sometimes let people back in after they’ve been banned, but the way to go about that is to e-mail the admins, and show them that you have an understanding of why you were banned and persuade them you’ll really truly stop doing whatever got you banned (although you didn’t stop doing it after several warnings). Or, more rarely, persuade them you shouldn’t have been banned in the first place. The way to get back on the boards is not to just keep registering new accounts.
Then, I don’t know, track IP addresses. Deleting information, no matter who posted it or why, really irks me. You may as well allow us to edit posts if you are going to delete other threads and posts.
MEBuckner, you’re missing the point (and maybe parts of the thread): We don’t care that the thread is benefitting a banned user. We couldn’t care less if he’s in his shotgun shack whacking off to how long his thread has gotten even after he’s been rebanned. We do care about how interesting the thread is to us, and how much knowledge we gain from it.
We think it’s time you Mods and Admins stopped caring so much about what the few persistent losers think.
I’ll take one more shot at this.
Muad’Dib: Well, of course ideally we would prefer it if we could stop returnees before they could post at all, but it’s not always possible to do this. (Or better yet, if they simply wouldn’t try to get back in, but went out and found boards more congenial to their posting styles.)
Derleth: The thing is, if you think the rules we have are worth enforcing at all (and perhaps some don’t), then there has to be some enforcement mechanism. If the only consequence of misbehavior (misbehavior which may well have the effect of making everyone else’s experience on the boards that much worse) is that your old username now says “BANNED” under it, and you have to go and pick up another free e-mail account somewhere and log in as a “Guest” every month–well, that’s not really much of a disincentive (at least to some people) against being a jerk. Ultimately, there’s little enough we can really do to people as it is beyond tossing them off the boards. It’s not like the Reader would let us go and TP their yards even if we knew how to find them.
But why inconvienience your paying customers? I rememeber a Diablo thread that was like 11 pages long, but since the OP was a sock, it was closed. Why punish the vast majority of non-trolls who participated in the thread and weren’t causing trouble? Ditto with the recent Fast Foods thread, and other recent ones. You talk about the trolls making the Board experience worse? I’d rather have a troll being obnoxious than have a thread I’m enjoying (or worse, participating in) disappeared.
I don’t buy the “Ignore them, and they’ll go away” theory that The Dope subscribes to (my experience from the Usenet is “Ignore them and they’ll be more persistant in trying to get your attention”) but granting the Dope’s premise, why not change their user name to “Sock”?
If all returning users are given the name “Sock”, and given that there are many trolls who return for the attention, if you lump them all together with the same user name, there’s no noteriety and no attention. The troll won’t be able to even search for his threads by username since it would pull up all the other threads by the other trolls who’ve been renamed “sock”.
I think each user name has to be unique, Fenris. So your suggestion of renaming them all to Sock won’t work, since there may multiple returnees.
It’s a pickle, isn’t it? Do we deprive the rest of us law-abiding Dopers of an interesting thread just because it was started by a sock, or do we give the sock the attention he craves so the rest of us can enjoy the discussion?
Is there a way to hide the user name from searches and views? Then a mod can edit the OP to something like, “Started by a returning sock. The topic was blah blah blah, salient points removed, discuss.”
Okay, I’ve only skimmed the thread and I haven’t had enough coffee yet. Maybe this has already been answered.
Isn’t it more work to find all of the posts by a sock-puppet and delete them than it is to simply ban him and leave the thread open, or close it, depending on how interesting the thread is? If so, then by deleting sock-posts the sock is achieving his aim of causing mischief by creating more work for the mods.
I say just ban the sock. If the thread serves no purpose for the rest of us (e.g., ‘I just farted!’), then close it. If the thread is interesting (e.g., ‘What’s your favourite planet?’) then leave it open. Deleting sock-posts, especially when they are the OPs, causes more work for the mods (I think) and can create some confusing threads. Deleting entire threads started by a sock robs us of some interesting threads. I think we should go back to the way it has been and simply ban the socks.
Okay, all those words made sense when I typed them; but I’m not sure they will later. I need to get more coffee…
It’s a shame we can’t stop trolls/socks from posting altogether with some sort of filter that checks IP addresses of new users. Or perhaps new users would have to wait 24 hours before they can start posting so that their credentials can be verified…
This is spoken by a woman who has NO idea what kind of work/technology would be involved, so feel free to ignore me if it’s glaringly stupid.
Yeah, i’m no expert on this either.
But i do know that my own ISP assigns me a new IP address every month or so. I wonder whether that sort of thing would make it harder to track these people?