I have no objection to goisrael being banned – but, his thread about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion being really about Illuminati rather than Jews – we were having fun with that! Where is it now?! Where are our posts?! :mad:
+1 to BG
I know some posters enjoy feeding trolls (this one was also a sock), but our policy is to discourage it by deleting their threads.
They are not burned (which is what happens in a memory hole). They are stashed in a top secret location.
If anything, doesn’t that kind of help the trolls? They kind of ruin it for everyone.
Fighting troll infestation is good. I say this as a participant in that thread.
AIUI, they’re not burned in the memory hole, either.
The Party just lets people THINK they’re burned, so anyone who wants to use the memory hole to delete evidence of their thoughtcrimes gets a false sense of security.
In both cases, some sick slobbering fascist is the only one who can look at your precious posts. You will never see your words again.
If your posts are that precious to you, you can always copy them and stick them in a file.
Trolls get off on responses, not on having their threads disappear.
If having your posts disappear distresses you so much, just be careful not to feed trolls.
Damn. Now I really want to read that thread.
Is not locking the thread sufficient sanction?
Not usually. We prefer the whole thing go away.
A locked thread is a troll trophy of sorts.
Do you believe your posts to be so valuable that they must be preserved forever, even if you’re just responding to an idiot troll?
In general, the SDMB does. If a poster asks that their own post (or thread) be removed, that request is denied. There’s rarely even discussion about it; it’s simply, “No.” There needs to be an overwhelming reason to do so.
Also, the board works very hard at maintaining its history. We have 16 years worth of history out there. Keeping it has been shown to be important, as when it was suggested that everything over a certain age be removed in order to improve board performance.
I have always been unconvinced that removing the threads of trolls (and, in some cases, socks) is an effective way of dealing with them. The board still gets socks; it still gets trolls. Removing their posts does not stop them, and therefore it is not that overwhelming reason to do so.
But it does stop them. We continually stop trolls, and we continually get an influx of new ones. We’re in the state of equilibrium we’re in only because of the constant vigilance of the mods. If they stopped getting rid of them, the trolls would just start accumulating.
What are you talking about? Is “them” the trolls or their threads?
There was a thread about a YouTube video that superficially showed a Sovereign Citizen succeeding in working his magic spell legalise nonsense on a judge, along with somebody posting a link to the court records that showed his total failure afterwards. Then some troll came along and bumped it by pissing all over everything and the entire thread was deleted. But it had been a real thread, not just some idiot spouting nonsense (until the troll showed up). Threads with real content should not be zotted out.
Well, both, but I meant the trolls themselves.
As far as I know, it’s always been board policy to remove threads by socks and trolls.
Actually it does stop a large majority of them. I would say fewer than one in ten trolls tries to come back as a sock after having their thread deleted. We do have the occasional persistent troll that tries to come back multiple times, but aside from a few that are clearly mentally ill they give up after a few tries. Saying that we shouldn’t penalize socks and trolls this way because we still get them is like saying speeders shouldn’t get tickets because people continue to speed.
That wasn’t a mere troll, that was the person involved in the original legal case (or so he claimed). It was removed because of potential legal issues involving an actual case. If it had been just a troll, we would have just removed the posts and left the thread.