OK, dumb question here. What’s with the http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=27299 thread? Why are these folks banned? How can they post when it says “BANNED” below their aliases, or does the Grand All Knowing Machine that is this message board go back and insert that in all their previous posts? And what the hell are they talking about?
Yes,Sequent, the folks in the thread posted before they were banned.After being banned, any messages with the banned username get the banned stamp on them(beneath the name).
And just in case no one has said it yet, Welcome!
The way this system works, member information is current for all posts, so if status changes, it changes on ALL posts made by the (former) user.
In most cases what gets people thrown out of here (at least lately) is harassing other forum members and/or having more than one operating screen name. (Some of these problem children used more than one screen name to harass other forum members, making a double play of sorts).
If you have any questions about our forum rules, please ask up . . . you might also read over the registration agreement . . . the one you said you’d live by . . . when you registered.
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
(This question was asked somewhere else, but I can’t get Search to work for me, to find it.)
Is banned the same as troll?
Is sockpuppet the same as troll?
Why don’t you remove the harassing messages? There seem to hundreds in the Barbecue Pit area, and many don’t say banned at all.
Also, there was a suggestion somewhere that if banned messages are left in place the names of all banees should become the same, to discourage ability to pick out one’s own words. In response, I suggested that if that was not possible, perhaps a name of Troll3276908, etc. would make it pointless to try to seek distinctions.
If you have answered these at the other discussion, please ignore here.
Bilder asked:
Well, Banned is hopefully what happens to someone who is a troll. If someone has “Banned” under their name, that means that the Mods or Admins here decided that that poster had broken the “don’t be a jerk” rule, usually for trollish actions or for having sock-puppets (see following for info on those).
Yes, and no, and yes. Okay, a Troll is generally defined as someone who makes specifically derogatory or inflammatory posts in the hopes of getting a rise out of people. Such as wandering into a thread about Judaism and saying, “Yeah, but they’re all lying about the Holocaust having happened.” The troll sits back and enjoys the ruckus and the attention lavished upon him (through insults, admittedly, but apparently in some people’s minds, any attention is good attention).
A sockpuppet is a second user-name brought in to agree with you. That way, when you start to lose a debate or a flame war, you can have the sock puppet (who seems to be a completely different poster) jump in to claim that you’re right, that your enemies are evil, that you’re a really nice guy, etc. so that people who read the thread think that you’re the one who’s right (or at least, the one who’s winning).
Now, some trolls will use sock-puppets. And while some sock-puppets are created in the spirit of good fun (one person created a sock-puppet named “Dead Equine” who would show up after a thread had been debated for a long, long time and say “Stop beating me!”), most are created by people who don’t care about rules; they just care about winning (like there’s anything to ‘win’ here other than esteem of your fellows, and you don’t do that by being an ass).
Recently, the term ‘sock puppet’ has been a bit misapplied; what we’re facing here is a few people who have decided to harass this board. These few people have created dozens upon dozens of different user names, and every time an old name is banned for being a troll, they trot out one of the new user names. Since it’s just a few people doing this over and over again, some people refer to this as sock puppetry.
As a reminder- no matter how cool it may sound to create a second, humorous persona, it is against board rules to have more than one user name.
Well, the Pit is for flame wars, so it might be that some of what you’re seeing is just standard Pit fare, or regular posters trying to defend themselves from the trolls.
The problem with deleting the troll messages are
A) it removes a paper trail. Once deleted, it’s gone, and it’s hard to be able to prove to people why someone was kicked out when there’s no record of what they did.
B) it makes all the posts in response to the trollish message look weird or non-sensical, which means either deleting those messages, or having people ask lots of qustions about what the hell was going on in the thread.
C) it’s a lot of work for the Mods to go through each thread and pick out the works of those who were later Banned.
Hope those answer most of your questions!
Nicely said, John.