Forgive me if this seems like a stupid question, but I’m really unsure about what being a sock entails.
Let me explain. I recently registered on the Giraffe Boards and used another name, Five Points Under. I really didn’t think too deeply about it, and I certainly wasn’t up to anything nefarious.
Can I use Two Many Cats2 on the Straight Dope Boards and Five Point Under on the Giraffe Boards? Or is that a big no-no? If it is a violation of the rules, I’d like to stick with my original user name Two Many Cats2. That has more history.
I am an Admin on the GB. The two boards are entirely separate entities with a lot of membership overlap. A lot of people have the same name on both but you are under no obligation to keep the same name over there as you have here.
At the GB, we generally do not allow people to take a name there that is the same as a name used by someone else here, in particular if it is a prolific poster.
Well, unless you’ve stopped doing them, there are also the Halloween parties, where people make a fun sock account, and then later people guess who they are.
It’s a cool bonus to allowing socking that I had never thought of.
There was a version of this on the old snopes Board when it first started, also on Halloween. But those boards were a lot more friendly than The Dope or Giraffe. No pitting or anything like that was allowed. As a matter of fact, users could change their own names any time they wanted too. That was mostly used on holidays, when you would make a holiday themed name that played off of your usual name. Or a birthday themed name. It was often quite fun.
I don’t recall ever getting my name verified, although I’m the same there as here. Is this a new-ish thing? If not consider, this my delayed verification notice