Thanks for the explanation. I’d forgotten about it, but I knew a guy who’d do that. Serially edit his posts as his points were shot down one by one, then, if he’d gone past the 1-hour edit limit, delete. Folks took to quoting the entirety of what they were rebutting to keep a record.
Guy was a bit nuts - claimed to be an FBI lawyer (was a failed law student), claimed he was reporting members to the FBI for “violent activities” (never explained what the “violence” was). I gave up early on when I realized that, while he wasn’t quite a troll, he did seem to live for his precious moments of being outraged. Turns out he’d made about 8 accounts from different IP addresses so when the mods got tired and suspended one acct, the next one would pop up a day or so later. At least he didn’t use them as sockpuppets.
Our more aggressive moderation won’t stand for that crap for even a day.
Discourse also makes the entire edit history of your post available to the Mods. So although we now allow extensive editing for up to IIRC 20 minutes after you post, any selective trollish editing like that would be transparent to the mods and once someone was reported for trollish retro-editing the hammer would quickly fall.
When editing was first turned on many years ago, I was afraid that would happen a lot and was against the idea. I was wrong. I don’t believe it has happened much at all.
Although that is the classic definition of a sockpuppet, this board has always been far more strict. No multiple accounts period. From the rules:
One screen name per user. Only one screen name is permitted per user. Use of multiple screen names (“sock puppets” or “socks”) is grounds for revocation of your right to post under ANY screen name. We reserve the right to refuse postings from screen names we find objectionable.
And the classic “talking to oneself” sort of sock puppet is incredibly rare. I think we might have had one or two in the past decade.
I was on a board once with unlimited-time editing, and it sometimes made a hash of a conversation even without malicious intent. It was a board for puzzles and brainteasers, and there were cases where an OP reformulated a problem to make it “clearer”, except that it made all of the discussion about the previous version of the problem nonsensical.
For the record, some of us created accounts -because- of Discourse. I was a long time reader of the OG column, and 5-6 years back started reading the “threadspotting” and “popular threads” links from the main page, but damn those were often broken, not loading, or glitching to hell and gone. So it was fun to read (and people watch the personalities) but I had zero desire to try to learn an archaic (sorry) interface and put up with the glitches.
Then it moved to discourse (which I had used at least a bit) aaaaand, well, the isolation of early COVID left me starved for interaction. So I joined, because it was sooo much easier in the new format.
Overall I like Discourse a lot better than vB. There are a couple of things that vB does a little better. The issue for some was the perceived steep learning curve. Many of us had been using vB for twenty years.
vB is perfectly functional. The issue was that the SDMB had an unwieldly amount of data that was killing our instance of it.
Our original plan was to upgrade to the latest version of vBulletin. We tried it out and it was a completely miserable experience. A lot of things didn’t upgrade properly, and basically we were at best trading one set of bugs for another set of bugs. Plus the newer version had more known security holes.
After fighting with it on a test site for a couple of months we gave up and started looking for something else.
Someone forgot to turn off the email system on the test site, so somewhere around 2016 or 2017 a bunch of people got bogus renewal messages after they had already renewed their memberships.
Indeed. GiraffeBoards, which has a tiny fraction of total posts and posts per day, is still on the latest revision of vB 3.x even though the latest version available is 6.0. In the unlikely event that we’d change, it would be to Discourse.