Over in IMHO there is a thread about penpals. It is locked. I opened it anyway and read through from the beginning, vaguely wondering why the kibosh after 25 posts. I made note it was not a zombie and my interest grew as I neared the end in anticipation of the ‘reveal’.
As it turns out, it was a HBK4894 thread. The dude has become infamous for his buckshot threadstarting (and not revisiting) habits and is forbidden to open too many threads.
Thing is, I found the topic quite interesting. Lots of nice reminiscences, including a very sweet story by NeonMadman (post #5) that I found quite touching.
I understand the annoyance that is HBK4894, but I do not understand the closing of a vibrant, evolving thread just because the wrong poster begat it.
Yes, because he’s been told not to start threads before, twice now. He doesn’t get to have a thread unlocked due to this. He needs to follow the rules given to him.
It’s part of the very customer-friendly policy that the SDMB has had for a decade or more: punish the good posters for the actions of the bad ones. They’d rather uselessly spank one troll and piss off 100* good posters than simply ban the troll and not piss off regular contributors.
I did not ask for the thread to be unlocked. I asked if there was a better alternative than locking it in the first place, given that it evolved into a genuine, interesting thread.
Why not the usual mod note >>> warning >>> suspension >>> banning progression?
The alternative is: Someone else can just make one, HBK doesn’t get the privilege, right now, of making topics or having any new ones open.
We are going through that procession…we’re in between the mod note>>>warning part. We took a side street that we will sometimes take called:
mod>>>topic ban>>>>warning
Why not just replace the OP? Swap the name/text of the OP with someone else and some sort of minimal “Let’s talk about penpals” token op, and let the thread go on?
I think you’re severely underestimating what we’re able to do on here mod power-wise, haha. There’s no option for anything even close to that on the mod control panel.
Closest thing would be to move the second post in that thread to make it its own topic and then change the contents of that, a bit, to read like a new OP. That would require the permission of that poster, though. Really, it’s much easier and faster for someone to just make a new one from scratch.
I think since someone is making a special request to keep the thread open, then the mods should just open it. While at the same time the Mods can still give warning or note to HBK4894 if he continues to defy moderator instruction.
I remember one particular poster was told to stop starting threads only to link to articles (or videos) he found interesting. Well, he did just that after he was told not to and the thread got locked.
Except after clicking on the link, I was like “Come on man, this would make for a decent thread.”
So I came here asking for it to be reopened. Can’t remember which Mod did it, but he was happy to oblige.
No, I didn’t miss the point. Given the circumstances, I think that if you are really interested in the topic the best alternative is for you to make another thread.
It won’t work. Merging sorts all the posts of both threads by date, the OP of the new thread will end up at the bottom. There’s an extension that lets you change the date of a given post to get around this issue, but…well, you know.
