To be a little clearer as to what the specific issue is, the big problem that Gawker is having is that because of their deliberate choice to allow non-IP-tracked commenting, they can’t ban an IP. So Joe Troll can make an account as joetroll1, post his unpleasant pictures and gifs, and when he gets banned just start up with joetroll2, easy as pie.
The SDMB does, so far as I know, allow for IP bans. This isn’t of course a foolproof method for stopping trolls of this nature, but it does mean that Joe Troll has to jump through a few more hoops to do something like that, and that kind of effort is often the best way of stopping trollish behaviour.
I honestly don’t care if they allow gifs or not (avatars would be nice, but I’m not holding my breath and hey, we’ve got Crazyhorse’s awesome script for that!), but seriously, this is complete paranoia. It’s a solution looking for a problem. (In fact, I’d be willing to bet that the only reason it would happen NOW is because people were so freaked out over it, someone would come in and poke you guys with a stick.)
Most definitely this. Now that Jerry is the only person who can perform most administrative tasks, his workload has increased to the point that he no longer has the bandwidth to address anything but the most pressing of concerns, like reposting announcements that submissions are needed for threadspotting.
I think it’s funny how the OP used a link from odeck instead of the initial Jez post. Anyway, if a troll had the stamina to annoy the SDMB for months on end, why post rape gifs when you could just say you’re a lonely girl in a wheelchair?
To echo this, it’s not the burner accounts that were the problem, it was accounts that were authenticated with throwaway twitter accounts.
In my memory, though, the SDMB had similar problems before IP bans were used. I distinctly recall a “123Kid” that was banned and immediately came back as “456kid” in the same thread. Can’t seem to find it again though, but that was years and years and years ago.
I’d like to point out that the Marketplace has image tags, and so far nobody (to my knowledge) has spammed Tubgoatse Party One Cup. Sure, you have to be a registered member and the OP of a thread to post images there, but you could just as easily make [img] tags member locked or a special pay option like Custom User Titles.