Can we have a moratorium on sock puppets for a weekend? Just let people go nuts, make up new accounts, and post crazy shit (err, well, crazier) for the weekend, and then ban them all.
Afterwards, we can try to figure who was who, or not. Or whatever.
I just want an excuse to use the phrase Sock Puppet Theater. It has a nice ring to it.
I think a weekend near April Fools’ would be nice, but that’s an awfully long wait.
I’m up for it! I think my sock would be named Casey and I’d be posting from jail asking about in-vitro fertilization. (need answer fast! or at least by Wednesday…)
I vote Hell No. I see absolutely no benefit to such a thing, and too much potential for mischief. There are boards that allow sock puppetry–this isn’t one of them, and I like it that way.
I can hear the mods moaning about the problems identifying and banning the socks all the way out here on the left coast. One of them is swearing loudly.
We did something similar on another board for Halloween. Staff gave a second username with special permissions to everyone who requested one–all spooky, scary, Halloweeny names–and we limited the masquerade to a single new forum. Regular posters could read but not post to the new forum (I even locked the Mods out), and the sockpuppets could read but not post to the regular forums.
Email addresses. Anyone who wants a sock has to use a yahoo email address with their ‘real’ name as the email address. (Which shouldn’t be a big deal because you have to have a different email address for a second account anyway.) Emails can be hidden but staff can still see them so a mod or admin can tell whose sock is whose by clicking on the username. Restrict it to one forum, or even make a new one for the weekend and any socks messing around in the rest of the forums get banned. Any socks that slip through because they’re not disruptive are not a problem in my opinion.
And you prevent the registration of a Yahoo email with an SDMB poster’s id by a different poster or some random person how, exactly?
I’m not against the sock idea itself in theory. But in my non-official opinion there are bound to be more problems than the SDMB owners and staff are willing to put up with.