Beats the hell out of me.
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Take your choice
The em dash accomplished that in preview, but when posted, Discourse changed it to a series of discontinuous hyphens: ------------------------------
Just when I thought we were done with the stupid discussion of dashes and other punctuation, it’s back.
So would you say your hopes for an end to this topic were dashed?
Sorry about that, I forgot.
As for the latest troll mentioned above, to return the thread to relevance, I looked for it in FQ but did not see it and wondered how come, was it cornfielded?
The specific post was removed along with the recent replies and the poster was moderated, but not banned. I think that’s probably all that should be said at this time. The thread still exists but the new additions are gone.
Origin of “Gal Friday” is the thread in question.
I’m going this far to keep the discussion in context but as I said upthread, I don’t think further action will need to be taken unless they return, at which point, my prior request was to flag posts in violation of the rules, just as you would for any other poster.
That’s actually a fairly common behavior: Some newbie shows up and drops some turds, we mods all say “keep an eye on this one”, and then they just disappear, rendering any further moderation moot.
For that matter, making one post and then disappearing is quite a common pattern for non-troll newbies, too. Always has been: Back in the days when it was easy to collect such statistics, our mode number of posts per user was 0, and the median was 1.
26 posts were merged into an existing topic: Talking about our number of posts. (Spin-off from the Trolls R Us thread.)
And trolls, by contrast (remember trolls?) quite often have a very high OP to post ratio (much higher than 1 in 22).
One OP, one post, one banning. The ideal troll.
Even beyond that. Consider, for example, SaSaLeLe2011, whose entire board persona consists of “Teehee, I’m 14!”
9 OPs and 29 posts, with OPs including such gens as:
- Are we living in this time on purpose?
- I’m curious about the ethnicity of an ambiguous TikToker
- Has anyone ever thought you were autistic before?
- Am I behind for my age?
And of course after a brief flash of activity, the account has gone dormant. Almost like lying in wait to come back in a couple years with a vengeance and really let us have it (probably once the current sock gets worn out and banned).
Pulled 26 Post count posts over to new thread.
Talking about our number of posts. (Spin-off from the Trolls R Us thread.)
Sock (or bot) on the rise: Matt2h. Has been around for a little over a year, has viewed three topics, posted three times (once in each topic) , and has two minutes of read time.
Every single one of its posts has been to resurrect an ancient topic, post a low-effort fluff post consisting of at most two sentences, and then disappear.
Someone should just ban it now on principle. Spare us the repeat hauntings and I suspect also the eventual shift to full-on troll.
Troll on the rise 294567. First post is about Soros…something…something on an old thread about commercials.
//i\\
Nasty bigotry.
Either troll or genuine bigot who somehow found that thread from some internet search. Either way, not going to last long here. That is, if they even bother posting again, which they might not ever do. (Most people who make accounts post either nothing, or one post.)
I have to give him credit for impeccable grammar, punctuation, and spelling. A true scholar.
There was a wacko OP that I found around sunrise today. Somebody with an axe to grind about actors who weren’t genuinely the characters they portrayed. The OP was about 25 paragraphs long, but mostly run together. Seemed human-written, not AI. But by a wacky obsessive human.
Several folks were welcoming / helpful and more were snarky about the wall o text that was real explicit about what annoyed them but refused to name the celebs they were talking about.
The OP had just started biting back at everyone who said something unfriendly to them. Then when I went to scroll down to the last few posts, the thread suddenly had been cornfielded. Poof!
Whatever their name was, they did not last long. I didn’t think the OP content so outré that they deserved banning for that offense alone. So presumably a sock.
Buh-bye sock; you stink!