I agree with magellan01.
And what about every other time that’s happened, like with the examples I provided?
If you’re asking me, could you re-provide those examples. I see that you listed the user names further on on this page, but I’m not familiar with the particulars.
Agreed. I’ll disagree with the mods when IMO the situation warrants, but I should also point out when I feel they made the right call, and here they did.
If anyone on this board doesn’t like me, tell me, Pit me, do whatever. But don’t call my school, work, or family. That’s absurd and over the line. These are pretend internet relationships. If anyone wants a real one, then we can become friends and PM each other phone numbers and emails and have consensual off-board contact.
To try to get a “gotcha” on any poster by invading his “real” life should be an instaban.
Instaban is probably too harsh as is “instasupsension”. I think more appropriate would be an immediate warning for “being a jerk”, as was the case with Simple Linctus. Now the reason Simple Linctus got banned was because he already had four warnings and a suspension on his record, so for him to get more warnings was pretty much setting him up for a banning - and that’s what happened.
I stand by: instaban. If I call your wife, your mother, or your employer to question something you said on this board, that is terrible at every level.
I agree that it is terrible as stated. However, that’s not what happened here, either. What happened here was Simple Lictus called a person he thought probably was the poster at that person’s office phone number. Not his boss or his wife or his children or his mother or his neighbor - that person. Furthermore, the specific reason was not to harass, but create an easy means of confirming the poster’s identity in order to defend that poster’s claims and credentials. So it wasn’t a malicious act. I still don’t agree with it, but the intent was not to attack pchaos, but to defend him.
And there are situations when it may be acceptable to try to contact the family. For instance, the situation where the poster died and someone wanted to console the family and get more details. I probably wouldn’t go that far - if I didn’t know that person IRL, I don’t see how contacting their family does much for anyone. But I can see how a person might feel that offering their condolensces to the family of a poster they really liked, to show that poster had influences in the world, would be polite. However, posting back to the board that poster’s private info without the family’s approval would be a bit too far.
Simple Linctus opened a pit thread on Pchaos. I don’t think he was defending him.
And if there’s any real need to contact someone in real life, I think it should be done only with the prior approval of the board administration, if there wasn’t already some kind of relationship there.
“Defending” is perhaps a mischaracterization. However, contacting pchaos offline and providing a means to verify online that actual identity would support pchaos’s claims that he is a lawyer, and refute the people questioning those claims. So it might have been something of a challenge to pchaos, but it also was a means of supporting pchaos’s claims. And Simple Lictus did say something about being willing to retract his accusations and apologize if pchaos did reply with the code.
You’ve GOT to be friggin kidding.** SL** was out to prove pchaos to be a liar, just like the those pitting him had stated in no uncertain terms. He couldn’t do it within the thread, so he went off board into real life. A completely dickish move. What if his secretary had answered the phone? Is SL then permitted to fish for all kinds of info, as well? Fuck that. You may want to rethink both your characterization and defense of this assholish behavior.
If he was calling his office, he had no way of knowing that he wouldn’t end up speaking to pchaos’ boss or some other person who would take a dim view of some random person that pchaos had a dispute with on the internet calling him up during office hours.
Seriously, how would you feel if someone who was Pitting you called you up at your place of work? Would you be perfectly cool with that?
Simple Linctus was most certainly not defending pchaos. He was the primary “you’re not a real lawyer, are you” accuser. His goal was, explicitly, to prove pchaos was impersonating the RL lawyer of the name pchaos was allegedly posing as. It was a poorly designed* and ill-thought-out** attempt at a ‘gotcha’ to prove his allegation.
*It wouldn’t prove anything, one way or the other, unless pchaos: a) was the RL lawyer in question, and b) wished to acknowledge that. If lacking b), he wouldn’t respond, even if he was the guy Simple Linctus googled up, so therefore a non-response won’t prove a) false. Ergo, it was a worthless test of pchaos’ claim. Additionally, on googling up the same info Simple Linctus did, I came up with the possibility of more than one person, business address, and phone number, indicating possibly 3 or more individuals who might meet the info he was using. a ‘no-hit’ test on one, even if properly designed, says nothing about the others. Additionally, Google doesn’t necessarily give accurate results. It marks the butcher shop located a bit east of me as a somewhat longer walk to the west of me. And gets other places I know several miles off.
**It was a highly jerkish thing to do, regardless of pchaos RL identity.
Simple Linctus thought pchaos was lying and he said so several times in ATMB and the Pit. It’s true that he said he’d be willing to retract the accusation if pchaos returned his call, but of course it depends on Simple Linctus having called the right number. More to the point, it’s a coercive request: ‘I will stop calling you a liar, but only if you confirm your work phone number to me and everyone else who is attacking you online.’
I just used my GPS to measure the error. I walked to the butcher shop, and measured it with my GPS. Google places something I just measured as 300 to 350 meters east of me as about 400 to 475 meters to my west. And as I mentioned, it sometimes gets things far farther wrong than that. You cannot rely on Google. When you do, you demonstrate your own stupidity.
I agree it was a dickish move. I agree he couldn’t be certain the message would not be retrieved by someone else, or that someone else might not answer the number. I agree that fishing for info from someone else would be even more dickish.
That is true, but he called the number he presumed was possibly the person in question, or else someone that he felt was having his identity stolen. It’s not like he looked up the guy’s firm name, then looked up the directory and called the CEO or something. He tried to reach the individual in question.
Still dickish, but not intentionally tattling on him.
NO I would not be absolutely cool with that, as I have stated several times in this thread now.
Thank you for the clarification. I was unaware of that angle.
Totally agreed.
He didn’t do any “investigative googling”. He googled pchaos’ username. People do that all the time; in fact, the mods do it when people post giant screeds to see if they’ve been reposted from elsewhere.
It also depends on pchaos being willing to play that silly game in the first place.
What he did, and what you describe, is investigative googling.
The precedent that you can Google people has already been established, and in some instances it’s been a benefit to the board. I can’t say it did in this case, but I don’t know that it hurt anyone either and pchaos didn’t seem to care at all. Like I’ve said a few times, if a person posts a bunch of material about themselves on several message boards, they’ve already put the information out there for anyone to find. Finding that material can’t sensibly be construed as a violation of their privacy.
I’d say that googling to discover some info on a poster’s real life, and then sharing those findings should be grounds for suspension, and possibly, depending on the particulars, banning.
The info is already out there for anyone to see because the poster put it there. We’re not talking about hacking into someone’s bank account or going through his garbage.