What happened to this person's name?

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1

I’ve noticed that in a few threads like this one, there is a poster or posters who’s user name field is blank… I’m curious as to why this is.

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=22069

2

I’m guessing that that’s a thread started by a troll whose ultimate punishment by the Adminstration was to have its user name blotted out from the Book of SDMB Life–the Hell of Total Anonymity.

3

Possible Y2K problem? Look at the date and time of the OP. What are the dates and times of other posts like this?

4

That post was written by bballkitten as I’m sure you’ve figured out. This person was one of those who came over to post in the Left Behind debacle. I’m not certain what happened to the OP’s name and user info, but I suspect it was some kinda glitch during either the conversion from UBB to vB, or a glitch during one of the vB upgrades. Or possibly a combination of the two. I can authoritatively state that it is unrelated to Y2K. The SDMB experienced no failures or other technical difficulties during that little non-event.

5

I liked DDG’s answer better.

6

Me, too, but alas, that’s not the case.

7

But you guys could do that, right? I mean, like if somebody did something really bad?

8

Yeah, we have a “delete all posts by this user button,” but it would be even more drastic than simply putting “Guest” in the posted by slot. All references to that poster would completely vanish from the database and any thread started by that user would disappear in its entirety.

And even though I know with almost utter certainty that a certain recurring troll is gonna come in here and tell you different, I’m gonna say that we’ve never used it.

9

Thanks UncleBeer,
you can close this thread now if you think it’s going to attract trolls.