They’ve convinced themselves that fooling the board is fun. Then they realize it’s not fun unless the person being fooled knows they’ve been fooled, so they out themselves and get banned.
Kinda sad, really.
Agreed.
I do believe our dear mod Giraffe subscribes to the welcome/welcome back, now fuck off school of thought. I for one find it refreshing.
Without any specific knowledge of the IP address thing, or whatever other methods are used to determine hosiery status…
I assume that a poster who shows familiarity with the boards, and is not otherwise being a jerk, would get the benefit of the doubt? Even if it was more than a suspicion that it was a returning sock? I’m not talking about things like -
Because I am more or less the opposite of Bryan Ekers - I would rather postpone a banning for a well-behaved sock until he or she started being a jerk.
Not that I specifically object to any of the recent bannings. As I said, I have no access to the Secret Methods of determining who might be a returned bannee, and I bet most of them were here to create trouble anyway.
Perhaps there has been more activity than usual at the Board That Dare Not Speak Its Name. I suppose I could go check, but meh.
Regards,
Shodan
Anyone else remember sqlcub/dorkusmalorkusmafia?
For those who weren’t around at the time: sql was banned after abruptly ending a post then not returning for days, causing the rest of the board to worry that something bad happened to him. dorkus registered some time later and decided to leave with a [del]ban[/del] bang when the board went pay; outing himself (so to speak) as sql. He was so well behaved at that time that he likely could have kept up the charade had he decided to pay.
The ones who amaze me are the ones who get nailed after an incredibly low number of posts. Sometimes in less than double digits.
Hardly enough time or content to assess nuances, style or ax grinding.
I’ve always wondered, in these cases, what it was that twigged the mods, admins, to their existence. It makes sense they would like to keep these things close to their vests and I suppose in a way that makes it all the more impressive. To me at least. :OTOH, not being very techie myself, perhaps I’m just easily impressed. 
To be honest, I’ve been a little nervous about posting for this very reason. I know most of the inside jokes, but y’all don’t know me. I just imagine that you’ll see a '99 with double-digit posts and say “um, who IS this kid?”
But then I read this:
Heh. I’ll keep that in mind.
Then he wouldn’t have been able to answer my question. It’s not like a fire broke out in the nursery, ffs.
Lute: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=96741
eta: And he didn’t really have to out his dorkusmalorkusmafia sock. IIRC, he was worried that the credit card info would give him away but the mods would have never seen it.
Sqrlcub was Dorkusmalorkusmafia!? I totally missed that, I guess.
Did you really expect an answer?
BTW: weird thread, was that his last post as sqrlcub?
He might have answered, if wasn’t for those meddling mods!
I think sqrlcub might have made an apology post, but I think that was pretty close to the last. I meant to also link his self-outing.
Thanks, guess my memory was a little off.
Yep.
That’s like saying the opposite of “left” is “purple”. I don’t care that much about socks, as long as their numbers are kept low; I just have little patience for someone who’s a jerk right from the get-go, sock or otherwise. If he;s a genuine newcomer, maybe he’d mature in time, but I’d rather the lesson be harsh and quick rather than at the poster’s own pace. And if he’s a sock he has even less excuse. Either way, show them the door.
Probably my fault, I reported him within a minute or two of his post.
Jim
I’m reminded of King Nifty, a sock who triumphantly outed himself to a hail of mockery and indifference. That was back before the board went pay to post, years before I became a mod so I don’t know if socks were much more or less common than they are now, but the basic reaction is the same: big deal.
There’s always a subset of socks who think they’re somehow pulling something over on us by registering a fake account on our message board and posting here. I think they greatly overestimate the degree to which we worry about it. At the end of the day, either you’re outed and people think you’re a loser with nothing better to do or you’re not and you get to post at a message board. Not exactly high stakes, either way.
Here’s the fixed link, Giraffe: King Nifty.
Based on the correspondence from past posts and correspondence from repeated socks/trolls, my perception is that there is a small number of people who are disturbingly obsessed with the SDMB, and who visualize the moderators as a near-fascist police force who are frantically searching for any and all sock activity.
In reality, we’re more like groundskeepers, pulling up the weeds when they’ve become troublesome to the healthy plants and throwing them away. I really don’t lose any sleep knowing that there are, inevitably, return guests - some of whom don’t even realize that they’re breaking rules - but we try to remove those that we know about, and investigate those that are troublesome.
Because it would be impossible, we don’t rely on getting 100% proof positive. After all, if we made a bad call, it can be reversed. However, most people who join as guests and come out with both guns blazing at staff or users without explanation are repeat customers (or, rather, non-customers), and get the banstick sooner or later.
I interpreted your post to say that you would be more comfortable with a small number of “false positives”, where people were banned even if they were not socks but appeared to be so. I wasn’t talking about jerks from the get-go, as I tried to make clear.
On the other hand, I don’t care all that much, so my apologies if I misunderstood you, even if we don’t seem to disagree.
Regards,
Shodan
Well, I may have been unclear. A better way of expressing my post #10 might be: “If confronted with an allegedly new poster who is acting like a jerk right from his earliest posts, he may be a sock (which by board rules means an instant ban) or he may just be a jerk (which generally involves several warnings before a ban). I’m prepared to tolerate the admins banning such people even if their sockdom is not proven beyond a reasonable doubt, even if this means kicking some genuine noobs, because noobs who don’t know how to make a good first impression are jerks, anyway.”
Wait, we’re getting civil in the Pit. Fuck you!