It’s gone. I found it a very interesting thread. Was it started by a sock?
Yep. See the associated Pit thread.
You know, regardless of who started it, it was a very interesting discussion. Couldn’t we have locked it and started a new one with another valid user?
Patty O’Furniture had an excellent suggestion. Is this doable?
Which forum was it in? I’m the one who removed all the OP’s.
I think I can retrieve this one. I assume it was in IMHO?
samclem
I thought it was Cafe Society.
If it’s possible to adopt a thread, I’d be willing to adopt it, with an appropriate disclaimer about the unnamed sock.
I just started it again in IMHO. While it was about TV, it’s totally opinions and a poll. A moderator from IMHO can move it if necessary.
Hope we can accomodate posters when possible.
Yay! Thanks! Can we make that a policy with harmless threads from now on?
It’s a lot of work, especially if the jerk has posted multiple times in the thread. And, of course, we can’t pre-date posts, so the new “What’s this thread all about” (replacing the jerk’s OP) would come well into the thread, if I’m understanding what you want.
However, I don’t see why we can’t do it. It would solve the problem of what to do when an undesirable poster creates a fun thread.
Well, you have the ability to edit posts, right? I’ve seen links broken and fixed and such. Perhaps deleting or editing the OP (if appropriate) and changing the user name to something like Banned Sock would be useful?
Urk. I just moved it to Cafe Society.
Apologies to all; hadn’t caught the full backstory on this one. This thread has to set a record for being tippped upside down, pulled inside out and generally shuffled around.
Veb
Veb made the correct move.
Polls about art, books, entertainment, movies, etc., belong in Cafe Society.
Tain’t that easy. Deleting the first post deletes the thread. And we can’t change the username that easily – well, OK, we could, but then each new such would need new username, and we’d be at “Banned Sock 23” in no time. And, of course, it would change all the other posts by that person to the new name, which would make documentation an absolute bitch.
We’ll discuss amongst the Mods. If a sock starts an interesting thread, we might find a way to kill the initial post and keep the thread rolling, although that might be confusing without the first post… ?
Dex, could you make one generic name (SockDoe, comes to mind), so any interesting, sock-generated, threads would be reassigned to a single ghost poster.
I guess what I’m suggesting is moving all the responses, other than than the sock’s, to a new thread with a surrogate “mom.” For clarity, paraphrase the original OP.
And are there really that many interesting threads started by socks? Aren’t most sock posts just “more of the same”?
I know it might be more time consuming than feasible, just a brain storm… well, more like a little squall. 
I don’t think this is really practical. We’d have to rename ALL the socks to the one name, and we do keep track of things like IP addresses and posting habits. That would make it much harder to discover new socks.
As for the confusion of deleting first posts in “when good threads are started by bad socks,” may I suggest that an edit placed at the beginning of (former) post #2 might be in order?
Something like: “Mod Hat on: A returning sock-puppet suggested that discussing what typical TV shows might be like on a TV network in the Tolkien universe. His OP has been removed; what follows in this post and others are responses to that question. Mod Hat off.”
If we delete the original post, the rest of the thread is also deleted.
And therein lies the problem: We can’t change the original poster name without destroying our chain of evidence, which is sometimes a necessary thing.
We can’t simply remove the original starter post; that automatically deletes the thread.
What we can do is start a new thread and maybe move the responses to it, but with the board problems of late, that may well be difficult to accomplish; the system times out for us like it does everyone else.
We’ll do what we can for you, though, as we can.
your humble TubaDiva
Yes. But what I did in that case was to first move the entire thread to the sekrit lab. Then I split the thread, leaving the offending OP on the cutting room floor, and moving the entire rest of the thread back to the boards.
poly. You’re right–I should have added a mod-type comment in the 'new" OP. But I made a judgement that it read OK as is.
Again, I hope the TM don’t get the idea that this is something we’re gonna automatically do in every case. I’d take it to be NOT the norm.
Give it some time for the Admins and Mods to discuss in email. And, again folks, we have lives. This is not something that will be written in stone by tonight.