Is there a particular reason you recall someone from before P2P, when you signup date is 2009 and P2P ended in 2008? (I got in on the tail end–and never paid.)
Your assertions have very little basis. One example from 11 years ago doesn’t constitute a lot of contrary evidence.
That’s not an example of someone who eluded detection by changing their behavior. He was original banned for trolling (which he refers to as a practical joke). He wasn’t banned for prolonged jerkish behavior. That was all the way back in 2001, long before we had established the current system of usually banning only after multiple warnings and a suspension.
No doubt there are some returnees who escape detection. But if a poster is capable of changing their behavior, then they normally do it before it reaches the point when they are suspended or banned. Anyone who can’t control their behavior sufficiently to avoid getting banned is probably not going to be able to control it enough to avoid detection if they come back.
Quickly hands Sailboat a torpedo proof Bat shield stolen from the Batboat in a moment of youthful indiscretion. Cause that was funny!
… and mails the family a bill for the bullet.
My post was intended as a whole with two complementary points, and you can’t split it up, as you’ve done here.
My cite to that specific poster was intended to establish that it’s possible for someone to escape detection. Once it’s known that it’s possible, then it’s a question of how likely it is. And the point here is that you can’t possibly know that, since you obviously don’t know about anyone who is escaping detection. The one incident that I cited was an outlier in that the guy deliberately outed himself, for reasons that were specific to that time. But presumably if there are others who’ve pulled it off they would still be under the radar.
So in sum, an assertion that no one or virtually no one has ever succeeded in coming back surreptitiously after being banned has very little basis. It’s a claim about something that is virtually unknowable.
I disagree with this.
There are probably posters who can change their behaviour to the point that they won’t initially attract attention but are incapable of staying out of trouble once they are already on thin ice due to prior history.
In addition, once in a certain board identity people have reputations which may attract reactions from others that get them into situations that bring out the worst in them. Starting over with a clean slate could help them avoid that.
I agree.
Your first sentence was “These assertions have very little basis.” Correct?
Let’s take a look at the three quotes you were quoting when you wrote this.
This is true. Previous guests are usually identified by their IP and have been caught many times on here (more often than not) by using IP searches and matches.
So the assertion made here is true…it does not have “very little basis”. It is, without a doubt, true and proven and happens more times than it doesn’t.
Next we have…
This is also true. I have caught at least 30-40 socks alone based on seeing behavior of a current sock, becoming suspicious, and then doing some detective work and finding out they’re a sock and I know many other mods have done it that many times too, if not more.
So the assertion that Colibri makes here is 100 percent true. It does not have “very little basis”. It has been proven true and to work.
And again, we have caught more socks with it than socks that we’ve missed or that may still be posting…and yes, we can actually say (this is in reply to your “It’s a claim about something that is virtually unknowable”) we know that we have caught more socks than there are socks we don’t know about, unless you think we have anywhere from 200-300 socks running around here currently…which I highly doubt.
Lastly, there’s…
Nothing Superdude says here is untrue and hasn’t been the case. Everything he’s stated is entirely true and has been proven and done many times over. So this is another assertion that does not have “very little basis”.
Now, on reading your post where you reply to me, I see you changed it to “I was talking about you all saying there can’t be a person under a sock account running around and you can’t tell how many there may be” (I’m paraphrasing, that’s not a direct quote, obviously), but none of those three quotes you quoted had anything to do with that point. The point of them all is that we usually find socks fairly quickly and socks don’t last long here. That was their original point…and by that standard, all of the assertions they make are correct.
Now if one of them had said “EVERY sock is found and there are not any sock accounts currently”, I could understand your reasoning and your “These assertions have very little basis” would be correct.
And again, you may say “Well, we don’t know how many socks you haven’t caught”, but, again, I can say to you, with 100 percent certainty, that it isn’t higher than the number we have caught…otherwise everyone on this board would be a sock account. Except for yourself, I’m guessing.
Actually sock refers to someone who would use SOCKS to set up a proxy server to hide their IP if they wanted dual accounts.
I thought it was from Shari Lewis and lambchop?
You can disagree with all you want, but since you have essentially no knowledge of the actual situation, your opinion isn’t of a great deal of value.
Rumsfeld’s brilliant categorization applies: there are unknown unknowns, and known unknowns.
Not every citation of “you can’t prove a negative” is valid.
About the only thing I ever gave Rumsfeld credit for was knowing about Johari’s Window.
I’ve mentioned this before, but the first time I signed up here, in my naivete I used my real name as my User Name. But then I had second thoughts and figured that might not be such a good idea after all, so I signed up again under my present User Name. A short time later, I received an e-mail from Admin saying I was banned for having two accounts. To the best of my knowledge, I’d done nothing apparent to clue anyone in that I was the same as my previous account. It was early days, and I was not very well known. After e-mailing Admin and explaining the situation, they let me back in and just changed my posts with my old User Name to fall under this account.
I’ve never figured out how they knew. This was not a case of them catching my sock after I was already banned. Does Admin or the Tech Department run routine search programs for similar ISPs?
Nonsense. Anybody’s post can be parsed to smaller statements to be examined in detail. If we were talking in person, I could just as easily latch onto one sentence out of your reply and take issue with it.
Besides, I don’t see how splitting in this case makes any difference in the point. You made a blanket statement that certain assertions about the likelihood of socks have “very little basis”. That’s a bold statement. You then followed that statement with two complementary points, as you say. The first is one example you recall where someone did come back and post for a while without detection, and was only banned when he deliberately revealed himself. That’s one example to prove your point that it can happen.
Your second point was that if one could do it, more could do it. And you add to it the comment that the moderators don’t know who they haven’t caught, by definition. Because if they knew, they have therefore identified them as a sock and banned them.
Now I agree with you to a point: the example that one person got banned and managed to come back under a different identity and stay under the radar shows that it is possible. And it is true, by definition, the moderators can’t say with certainty there aren’t any socks they haven’t caught.
However, to say that there is “very little basis” is inaccurate. There is good basis to say the statements that you cited before your commentary, as explained by Idle Thoughts. Many socks are identified by their IP. Many socks are identified by their behavior, which makes a moderator suspicious enough to investigate.
The fact that the moderators might have missed one or two socks out of hundreds of active posters does not discount the above at all. All it would prove is that the system isn’t perfect. Congrats! Nothing is perfect.
The moderators have access to things like how many different IP addresses are being used here. They also know stats on how many socks they find a week/month, and maybe even a running tally. And there are stats on how many usernames are active, i.e. have posted in the last week/month. So there are numbers that bound the problem of how many possible undetected socks there could be.
I will go one further and say that occasionally someone pops into ATMB and admits they used to have a different username, that they had forgotten their logon and just reregistered. Because this has happened more than once, I can say with near certainty that there are probably a few people out there still that fit that category of “sock”. I can’t say with certainty how many there are, but I would put it under a dozen. I would bet (well, I don’t bet, but it’s a figure of speech) that that number is higher than the number of socks that are previously banned members who have returned under a new ID and remain undetected.
I’m not saying it’s impossible. Hell, it’s entirely likely that someone who was a prolific poster back in 2000 and got banned for some reason came back in, say, 2007 and reregistered and is doing fine. Life changes, people come and go, people mature.
Plausible points, but the counterpoint is that it takes a lot of effort to get to that first suspension that put them on thin ice. If they could have changed their behavior, the first couple of warnings should have done it.
If we’re going to parse, then technically that comment has three assertions. You addressed the first.
The second has an “always” in it, which leaves room for refutation. The third confuses intelligence for, I don’t know, civility?
Not that it changes your overall point, but there’s more in that statement than what you addressed.
I did that not that long ago, although rather than post in ATMB I DMed a couple of the mods who sorted it out for me and deleted the extra account. The PTB are generally pretty reasonable about this sort of thing if you’re clearly not aiming to deceive or circumvent the rules.
To be frank, I find your entire post bizarre.
All you did was to find something that was true in each of the three posts I had quoted and declare them to be correct. It was not my intention to say that every single thing in those posts was incorrect. There was a common theme in those three posts, which was that all or virtually all socks are caught, and this is what has little basis.
(Note: emphasis added) The first post said “I think only one person has pulled something like that off where he signed up again, and went for a year or so before he was found out. He got banned then too.” The second said “And if they’re not then they will always reveal themselves by the same sort of jerkish posts that got them banned in the first place.” The third was not explicit in this regard, but it was posted in support of the second post (which it quoted).
So that’s the point I as disputing, and this should have been additionally clear by what I actually wrote.
Consider rereading my post. What I was disagreeing with was not something factual, but a rationale that you offered - this has to do with what people are capable of and nothing to with factual knowledge of the “actual situation”. (Which is besides for the fact that, as above, your “actual knowledge” only gets you so far and you don’t know what you don’t know, pretentions otherwise notwithstanding.)
This is a logical error, or nonsense as you might say.
Of course you can examine something in terms of smaller statements in more detail. But what you can’t do is pretend that each smaller statement was intended to make the broader point on its own, and then attack it on the basis of its failure to do so.
In this case, my intention was not to prove from that one single incident that there must have been a lot of other such people, only that it was therefore possible that there were a lot of other such people (which, per Step 2, was an unknowable number). Therefore, counterpointing that “one guy doesn’t prove that there were a lot of others” is an inapropriate distortion of the point.
My point is that you have a fair point about the possibility that there are a few uncaught socks, but you are overstating your case in just the same way you are complaining that they are overstating the case about catching socks.
There may be a handful out there. There are certainly way more that are caught by the methods mentioned, and the policy is to make them go away.
Someone can create a new account, but if they announce they’re back, they are instabanned.
If they try to hide but the mods discover (by IP or behavior), they are instabanned.
If they try to pretend to be someone else, they may get away with it for a while, but if discovered, they are instabanned. The mods won’t currently let someone sneak back in under a new ID, even if they change their behavior. If the mods know about it, they are instabanned.
The old policy was somewhat more haphazard in banning, and things may have happened differently in those days. There are a handful of cases of banned people getting readmitted by convincing the mods they were changed. But that predates the several warnings/suspension/ban policy that is now in place. Those special cases don’t really apply to the question of what happens now.
Then it’s pretty much irrelevant as far as this board goes.
Just seeing this thread title is killing me.
Where do banned folks go when they die?
They don’t go to heaven where the angels fly
They go to the lake of fire and fry
Won’t see them again 'till the fourth of July…
*Where do they go, the dead and the banned?
When their soul, their spirit, their names have been damned.
They do go to heaven, that’s where they’re at.
Pending transformation, by God, into bats.
Except for the Atheist, they’ll won’t get that turn.
God looks at them, and poooof, they’re a worm.*