Man, y’all are really suspicious. When someone registers to post in GQ, I suspect they’re idly curious in something. Years ago I had a whimsical question about whether Mark Twain’s estate could sue a spiritualist for royalties after she claimed to have channeled Twain in writing a postmortem novel (can’t Google the historical case now, since the novel “Channeling Mark Twain” is sucking up all the potential hits). I registered on this board to post this question. Turned out I liked the board and stuck around, but certainly other people register and post and then get distracted by something else shiny on the Intarwebz and never return.
yea, i get that, and youre prob right. my question has to do with the way some of these driveby posts are worded. it feels, to me, like some sort of suvey question; that theyre after some sort of data. but i cant, for the life of me, figure out what specifically they want to know. couple that with the fact that sometimes they NEVER return, not even to check out the replies, makes me more suspicious than i prob should be.
mc
The odd part is they go through the whole registration process, post a question and never even look for a first answer.
Their post time and last active time is the same.
Especially curious are the ones where they don’t come back even if people ask for clarification on a point or a statement of fact they made in their OP, and of course those that insert something vague like “I think this is interesting” or “I totally agree!” in the middle of a thread, then leave. If those eventually ever post again, their post usually is usually spam.
I’ve wondered what are the most weird or the most effective drive-by posts. A couple of months ago I read a post from a few years back that asked some sort of religious question (in a not particularly trolling way, IIRC) that lead to pages of replies, various fights between posters, all the typical stuff with controversial issues. That first-time poster never replied in the thread or any other ever again.
Early on in this board’s existence, I took a sample of registered users, to see what the distribution of the number of posts was. (I took a random number between 1 and 50, and took that user number and every 50th one after that. I think that gave me a sample of a few hundred registered users. I had more time on my hands back then. :)) There were A LOT of people who’d registered who had only one post, or hadn’t posted at all.
I’m sure that still happens.
yes, i believe it! but that still doesnt answer, WHY? and i dont mean to imply that that there is one answer, i’m just fascinated by the way some (apparently many) people’s minds think.
mc
On Chrome I can usually stay logged in, but more recently in Firefox I get logged out quite frequently (I’ll get logged out if I take too long writing a reply, e.g.), so I wouldn’t be so quick to judge the one-question posters.
If they subscribe to the thread, they may see an answer emailed to them, and never bother to log back in.
It’s a little weird–but ADHD still seems like a simpler explanation than any other.
So now we have another thread on the dangers of electrical plugs from a first time poster who just registered. Possibly pure coincidence.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=823715
It will be interesting to to see if they ever show again.
I assume the mods can see if these posters do add a subscription. If the OP didn’t it just gets really weird.
What’s the point of joining and not posting at all?
A few times, I’ve seen people register several years back and only reply once or twice. I’m not really understanding that either.
Well, some of us follow the convention of “lurking”. So that when we do finally post we already know the conventions of the board and we’re trying to not be ignorant fools. Lurking doesn’t always help with that but at least [del]-I-[/del] we tried.
Joining allowed me to sort of keep track of where/what I had read (this is the only board I read that marks everything read during a session once I leave). Otherwise I had been reading for about a year before I joined and found that I had been joined before that (guessing my password wasn’t too hard) probably from way back when I was still reading the USENET Cecil group.
I knew three, perhaps more, who joined, posted and probably never returned. In a senior center course on computers after then basic stuff there were sessions on email and searches and forums At least three joined here, asked a question and logged out. They laughed about how they would probably never remember how to do that again.
I’ve been on forums etc. since I ran my own on a 2400-baud modem, so I’ve seen pretty much the spectrum of communities. Here’s a recent one along these lines that puzzles me.
I am a member of the general group of users by virtue of owning a couple of the subject items. So I log in and say hi and ask a few questions, and pretty soon I notice that even the most benign posts tend to attract a lot of second-guessing criticism and finger-wagging about my implied choices. Continuing some threads actually gets me bawled out for my poor judgment and obvious noobishness (I’m not).
Now… this is the second-biggest board on the topic, which spends a lot of time bitching about how awful the biggest one is, and how glad they are they split off for their own community a decade ago.
I pretty much moved on from there and found a smaller FB group more tightly focused on my particular sub-interest, but I still wonder about the bullying, almost toxic zeitgeist of that board (which is into SDMB scale, not a minor byway).
I think is has everything to do with the moderation. Which, although a little erratic here sometimes, steers an awfully smooth course with an 'orribly difficult load of passengers. 
now there’s a scenario i never even thought of! students learning how to navigate message boards; that makes a whole lot of sense to me. and, for some reason, eases my paranoia about the subject a little. thank you janeslogin!
mc
I’ve always assumed it was a mixture of alcohol or weed plus boredom. Most of them probably don’t even remember registering the next day.
A combination of situations, I would think, based on prior experience.
- Legitimate users who make a post, forget about it, and never return.
- Legitimate users who make a post, get their questioned answered, and never return. (That happens a lot.)
- Legitimate users who make a post, get intimidated or aggravated because of the traffic and what people say, and never return.
- Users who make a post as a test, then return to spam the board. After that you don’t see them any more and everything they did gets whooshed into the cornfield. Sometimes those “users” are actually bots.
One of the new posters mentioned upthread definitely fit situation #3.
I got a PM 2 days ago saying that they didn’t appreciate being accused of trolling. They felt that being called out in this thread was an accusation. I replied that I hadn’t accused anybody of trolling and in fact had done the opposite. It looks like they’ve returned once since then (I assume to see if I replied to the PM).