Maybe you’d like to explain how you have certain knowledge of who is a sock and who is not. And if it bothered you all that freakin’ much, did you email a mod to point out the sock?
Maybe a bit of hyperbole… but would you want to shake hands with the dude? Let him within 100 feet of uncovered food? Introduce him to your sister? I have never (and this isn’t hyperbole) run into someone who I was so certain was wacking-off with one hand and typing with the other.
Try the creepiest denizen of this place.
I’ll freely admit I reported that post, with “WTF” in the “why are you reporting this?” box. It’s offensive for the sake of being offensive, with nowhere to go from the OP. I’m not a fan of TMI threads, but when they’r labeled as such I can just stay out of them and let the teenaged boys (and others operating at that level of maturity) amuse themselves – but yuck, I hated clicking into that nasty piece of wankery so I could report it. Like picking up someone else’s used Kleenex (R) when you know what it’s been used for.
I’m trying to think of a case where the company that owns a message board has gotten into legal trouble because of what someone has posted. Even in face-to-face speech, like the case of Coronado, the venue where he spoke wasn’t on trial.
I can understand that they have their standards that they want to maintain for their own idea of quality for their own message board. The “Don’t Be a Jerk” rule is one example.
But this whole thing of “IANAL,” IANAD," etc., and Bricker’s silly boilerplate (“I’m not licensed to practice law in your state,” or whatever it is) are ridiculous, IMHO. I can’t imagine anyone filing a lawsuit based on what an anonymous person posted on a message board and winning the case.
Think of it: “Judge, I hold the Chicago Reader liable because I asked it’s message board what to do about my sore throat, and one of its members, by the user name of Idontknowwhatimtalkingabout, said I should drink Drano. And so I drank Drano. They owe me big time.”
Or how about this: “Judge, I hold the Chicago Reader liable for malpractice because I asked for legal advice on its message board when I was on trial for murder, and one of its members, Imalawyer, said I should argue that Jesus told me to kill the guy, and I went to jail.”
I think there’s an inflated sense of self-importance going on here.
I am sorry to get your panties all in a bunch. I just use the same standard that is SOP here. I know it when I see it. In this particular case, everybody knew it when they saw it. It didn’t bother me at all. He amused me to no end. I was sorry to see him go. I might have even sponsored his membership if he hadn’t been banned.
You know, twickster, that really surprises me. It never occurs to me to complain about threads. I just leave the sickos to their own fun. 
I generally do too, but I found that one so egregiously offensive I couldn’t not say something.
guizot, I’m sure you’re right that no one’s gonna win such a claim, but it’s not just the winning.
As has been previously mentioned in these discussions, even defending a frivolous law suit can cost thousands. Unlike my motherland I think you still gotta pay the blood sucking lawyers, win or lose, in the land of the free.
And one thing the dope proves is that there’s no shortage of idiots willing to throw blame around. It only takes one to start a legal fuss at the Reader to shut down the boards.
Are we really allow to discuss them?
SBSO was blatant and likely another face of the same troll that made the Quiddity Glomfuster sock, an intelligent troll that maximized their annoyance factor. There is a similarity in the shtick and the timing is pretty interesting. QG was posting 16+ per day for months and stopped cold. Then SBSO was posting 17+ shortly after QG stopped.
Waverly, I did Email the mods on both and sent some PMs on my suspicions. I never heard back.
Jim
I agree with you and would have probably reported it as well.
Wow…that’s amazing to me. Not what I would have expected from the folks around here. When mods say that they closed a thread because of complaints, I always have been skeptical. Sorry, mods!
Geez, dude, and I was planning to marry your sister after all. Guess that’s off. BTW, you are wrong about EVERYTHING.
Now, Guin, there’s no use in trying to give me an award that you have already received.
Evil Captor sodomizes puppies.
Just saying.
No he doesn’t. He just ties them up.
Your a popular guy EC. At least you got an old lady. I guess you can’t be all bad.
Not everybody knew it. I don’t even recognize the username, let alone recognize it as a sock.
I guess we just enjoy the board in different ways. I’d rather joke and converse with people who are being themselves. You think an imposter trying to goad people is hilarious. There are 150 million places on the internet where you can be an anonymous asshole. Can’t we have just one where people make an honest attempt to be themselves?
Well I guess its safe to say that the mods have embraced the Justice Stewart standard of knowing when a thread is ‘bad’.
Like obscenity, they can’t quite define it, but they know it when they see it.
Dudes, this thread isn’t about me, though it’s nice to know so many of you are thinking of me.
This thread is about the mods. The question is, are they keeping it fair and balanced or are they getting clumsy and unbalanced? I think they are, for the most part, honestly trying to keep things fair and balanced. But even if they are making an honest effort, they could still be falling well short of the mark. A couple of factors could be throwing them off:
FCC-style post reporting. Remember the brouhaha over Janet Jackson’s nipple being exposed at the Super Bowl? And it turned out that all the complaints the FCC had received were a relative handful that were mostly form complaints from a religious watchdog group (Rev. Wildmon’s IIRC). Could be the same sort of thing happening here. Of course, there’s no watchdog group behind reporting posts at the SDMB, but suppose the SDMB was infested with a bunch of people whose tastes run in very narrow confines and who think everyone else’s tastes should be as confined?
Of course, we really can’t make any judgments based on that idea, it’s just something to be aware of. We don’t know how many reports posts get, we have to rely on the mods for reports about that, and they have a motive for over-reporting bad post reports – it transfers the responsibility for killing threads and such from them to a faceless group of people. Even if a mod always takes responsibility for thread-killing – something they have generally been willing to do in my case – the temptation has to be there, “I’m completely OK with your post on tying up puppies in TV movies, Evil Captor, but there were just SO MANY reports about it …”
Second, the mods could be engaging in some subtle groupthink. They discuss bad post reports and such among themselves, and eventually a group idea on what goes and what doesn’t arises, even if it isn’t explicitly discussed. Say, CK Dexter Haven and Czarcasm read that SkipMagic has killed a thread on who shaves thier underarm hair because it’s pointless and crass. They think, “Well, I guess it is pointless and crass at that, I’ll watch for that in the future.” Over time this could lead to a much more restricitive thread policing policy than anyone consciously intends.
Much as I don’t like it, I do think this is a valid concern. My husband told me just yesterday that his company is now keeping all emails on company computers for 35 years as required by new Alberta legislation. We feel like we are just screwing around here, and the things we type and post don’t mean anything, but I think that is going to be an increasingly naive viewpoint, once the courts and legal system catch up to what’s actually going on in the virtual world. Your company’s emails and voicemails are all discoverable in court; why wouldn’t threats or law-breaking posts on a message board owned by a business be discoverable?
Evil Captor, good points. I don’t think the posters or the mods intend to have their opinions influenced by other people’s opinions, but it is very difficult to not have that happen. You could even argue it’s impossible, given that human beings are designed to learn and absorb information from everything around us.