I took a look a week or two ago, and went back five or six months on his posting history. He is a prolific poster in QZ, and the only other place he’s posted in that time period has been in the Pit, and even then, it was a COVID-related thread.
He doesn’t post on anything other than COVID at this point.
Ah. Single issue voter.
There’s a good fourteen years of posting history before COVID-19 even existed, so it hasn’t always been that way. I haven’t evaluated any claims of threadshitting for myself (yet), but a topic ban as opposed to a total ban leaves the door open for the old SayTwo’s return.
Not that I think it’s likely, given how YWTF recently left the board after her topic ban.
~Max
Whatever he’s doing does not fall under our usual definition of threadshitting, which is to say a topic is not worthy of discussion.
I took another look just now – other than a couple of posts in the “Trolls R Us redux” thread in the Pit in August, one has to go back to September of 2019 to find a post by him that wasn’t either (a) in the QZ forum, or (b) on a COVID-related thread in a different forum (and even those can be counted on one hand).
Whatever sort of SDMB member he was pre-COVID, he’s clearly become a single-issue poster now.
Here are my comments from the troll thread. Some of my language is not quite kosher here in ATMB, but I stand by my thinking.
I say here now: ban him from QZ for threadshitting the whole QZ forum. QZ doesn’t have the “gravitas” for lack of a better word of GQ, but neither is it meant to be Monty Python’s Argument Clinic. Which is what we’re all getting; it’s far beneath the standard of even GD.
I’d argue it’s probably best to seek pandemic advice from government health agency and not SDMB. Just my 5cents.
What would you do if you encountered someone like that in real life?
I might ask to have them removed from the room, just like we do with children who sit at the grown-up table during Thanksgiving and keep interrupting our conversation with “why?”.
~Max
Avoid them like the plague to avoid catching the plague? 
I took a 100% sabbatical from the boards in late 2017. And returned just as we transitioned to Discourse in summer of 2020. This 2-1/2 year hiatus was for reasons in my IRL, not from any dissatisfaction with SDMB or its members.
But my last OP shortly before I signed off was, I think, a prophetic one. Despite the cool reception it got back then, I’ll draw attention to it right here right now. For reasons that will be obvious.
This is the Discourse url of the thread mentioned in the first sentence:
“Walk away from a conversation I am having with other adults” seem to be the answer you are looking for…but in real life I and the other adults would have the power to tell the unwanted person to go the fuck away. We can’t do that here. This is one of the many ways comparing real life conversations to message board conversations doesn’t work.
Please flag those as Something Else and comment that the thread is being hijacked then.
But you don’t have the power to make them go away. The only thing you have control of is walking away yourself. You want to have a cop make them go away, but a cop will tell you the same.
In the parking lot at the grocery store? Walk the other way.
At a party with a bunch of my other friends? If a big enough party, be talking to a knot of folks that he’s not talking to. If not a big enough party, or he’s too insistent to avoid / ignore, decide which of us to invite to an invite-only party I’m about to start elsewhere.
In the cube next to mine at work? Notify HR if he wasn’t amenable to shutting up about non-pertinent stuff once asked / told to do so.
If this guy (like the @Jay_jay) of my previous post/thread, had a hard-on for 9/11 or maybe some TV show or celebrity that’d be irritating, but I would totally accept that he should be allowed to be irritating on SDMB and the rest of us can avert our eyes from “his” pet topic.
Right now COVID is not really a joking matter.
Once again, if he is posting demonstrably false information report it.
In real life we have the power to say, “Go away-You and you stupid opinions are not wanted here”
BTW, If I wanted “call the cops” to be an option, I would have said something along the lines of “Calling the cops is, or should be, an option”, and I don’t recall saying anything like that.
And if he refuses to go away? He’s been told that in the Pit.
Outside of the Pit we are not allowed to tell him that he is not wanted and to go away, and leaving the conversation and going elsewhere, like the Pit, to tell him he is persona non grata back where the original conversation is taking place seems like a waste of time.
And? What if you were permitted to insult him in the original thread and he still didn’t go away? All that allowing you to insult him would do would give you some emotional satisfaction; it would in no way resolve the issue.