I had a question pertaining to the “benign sock” thread here, but as I posted it, it told me I wasn’t authorized to, and asked if I was attempting to edit someone else’s post!
I noticed when I went back to the page that a post (by a banned poster) was missing. Did I just happen to post in mid-Mod-action, prompting that message, or was it because I was quoting that post in mine?
(It wasn’t that important a question - this one has now superseded it.)
I believe you happened to submit your post moments after the post was deleted/disappeared by a Mod. I’ve had it happen to me before, too. You just didn’t beat the buzzer. If you have suspicion that the thread is doomed, you have to move very fast. These Mods get right onto spam and sock posts and all that sort of flotsam.
Ahh.
I didn’t think the post/thread was doomed, I just happened to notice the post I was responding to was made by a banned member. It didn’t have anything to do with that poster (who I am assuming was a sock him/herself, which would explain the banning) I just picked out one sentence fragment to ask about.
“Just a matter of timing” explains it - I was just startled to get the error message.
When we ban socks and spammers, we like to “disappear” their posts. We don’t have a lot of ways of discouraging jerks and jackasses from their childish games, but we figure that one tool we do have is the knowledge that their posts will vanish sans trace. It’s a little bit of leverage to try to discourage them.
So, it wasn’t the banning that caused your post to bounce, it was the deletion of the post (or possibly the thread being closed.)
Another question: the posts on the SDMB are arranged hierarchically, right? (Even though it doesn’t show on the default thread view.) So if I try to respond to a deleted post, it won’t allow me to, even if the thread itself isn’t closed, right? Otherwise I’d have a node hanging out of nothing in the thread tree.
If I’m correct about that, what happens when you delete posts that already have replies? Do you have to delete those posts too, or can you simply change their “parent” post and leave them in the thread?
Whether this answers your question in an official way or not, I can report that where there are 5 posts before this one (as I type and including the OP) there were several others that have been ejected through whatever technique the mod(s) chose. One of the deleted posts was one I replied to. My reply and the post I replied to are both gone in this iteration of the thread. From this I can assume the “dangling node” is dealt with either directly or as a function of the software.
It depends.
Usually, deletions of posts are done manually. If someone responded to a sock (presumably not realizing), then whether that post would be deleted is usually a matter of the Moderator’s best judgement. We don’t like to delete posts from real-live members but we want to erase as much of the sock slime trail as we can.
Oh, okay then. I must say that the moderators are quite effective, since they’re able to delete sock/spam posts before most people even notice they’re there.
In other words, it’s possible for a moderator to change a post’s parent node.
I even have this mental image of Mods crouched like tigers, waiting for some hapless troll, sock, spammer or other clueless jerk to step into the clearing and dare a post. Then they spring as if racing to be first, leaving at most a tiny cloud of dust. Then silence reigns in the jungle and the tigers are licking their lips and resuming their posts after a neat kill.