I thought I was going to enjoy that thread, but now I’m thinking that it wasn’t a great idea. cladking isn’t the only one to come to it and double down on their lunacy, just the latest.
Thanks for that thread ref. I had not thought about MANTRAPHILTER and his difficult-to-parse username in a long time. … A very long time. 
And that was a good thing.
Oh yeah, and SamuelA.
Two very different points out in wackyspace.
Nm - wrong thread
Cladking is back in the lunatic theories thread lamenting the opposition he’s facing here, whereby “everyone seems to know the answer and the nature of reality except for me.” He’s right! Maybe it’s because most of us have post-secondary educations and actually learned stuff.
You forgot about the Mantra Filter? The man single-handedly revolutionized physics by developing a completely novel theory of gravity that unified the four fundamental forces! How could you forget such a thing? I wonder if he has his Nobel Prize yet.
Good ol’ Sam actually had a superficial knowledge of a number of subjects, and he used that very superficial knowledge to propose “obvious” (to him) solutions to all the world’s problems. Which made him incredibly annoying. I forget precisely why he was banned but it’s no loss. IIRC, on various matters he had a casual and unreliable relationship with the truth.
It looks like the links are all broken though.
This tag will help locate the bannings and suspensions:
suspension-banning
From what I can see it was being a jerk, being a racist and misogynistic. That is a pretty bad collections of warnings and suspensions.
Thanks for that, and for clarifying the contents of the broken links.
He was very annoying for multiple reasons, and I strongly suspect less than truthful on multiple occasions.
As I recall, he talked shallowly about interesting topics, so he was especially annoying
All those links are examples of the many vBulletin links that could not be updated to Discourse links in the move.
And I still don’t know a trick to cross-reference them. A real shame.
What does it say about me, I’d like to open all those and read?
Curious like a cat maybe?
Do you believe theres something to learn from it?
???
Probably not. I’m not sure. I barely remember the poster in question and wasn’t a mod at the time. I can say from his warnings, he seemed to get them from many different mods.
You’d have to use the Wayback Machine somehow. Is there API access to it?
Not that I know of.
I might be able to reverse into the links from the recorded warnings. But those are probably also broken.
Oh, I’ve got thread names at least, so that does help. Some links are intact, weirdly inconsistent.
Those links are all to a vBulletin page that could show a single post, outside of the thread context it was embedded in. The url parameters include the post ID.
I do not believe that Discourse has any corresponding functionality. I don’t even know that Discourse has post IDs distinct from thread and position IDs. Thinking like a database designer I sort of expect it does. But I can imagine ways to build it where that’s just not necessary, and a post doesn’t have a lifetime distinct primary key, but rather its current primary key is threadID + ordinal post position within thread.
I will muck around a bit and see if I can learn anything useful. No promises. The fact those links weren’t fixed up by the process that ported the data from vBulletin to Discourse suggests that the Discourse devs knew that particular fixup was an impossible ask.
It’s a minor miracle ANY content made it across the rubicon there.
cladking is now becoming an attention-seeking troll-like creature in the lunatic theories thread. Even worse than the Mantra Filter who hasn’t been around lately. Some of us – and I freely admit to being one – just can’t help but getting sucked into a response by the kind of simplistic stupidity that should just be ignored.
It’s a common failing. There’s an old XKCD cartoon where the wife yells out to the husband at the computer, “aren’t you coming to bed?” and the response is “Can’t. Someone is wrong on the internet!”
I greatly enjoy this kind of crank. I hope he/she sticks around.
I think you might be mistaking “playing with the food” with “trying to change the mind of the food”.
Or is that “fool”? I get confused sometimes.