I’ll absolutely agree, samclem is the best of all of us at catching mental cases. It takes a thief…
Oh, shit… Did I say that in my out loud voice?
Guests are banned darn near instantly for spamming or trolling. Those who hang around long enough to be members generally, by the time they are banned, have violated far more rules than just “don’t be a jerk.”
Omegaman is correct; he was the most recent - in my memory - to walk the line of jerkishness. I’m exceedingly pleased to note that he is becoming a more or less normal, albeit distinctive (as are we all), member of the community.
Well, let’s put it this way. If you’re such a compulsive jerk that you get yourself banned the first time, you’re almost certainly such a compulsive jerk that you won’t be able to stop drawing attention to yourself for being a compulsive jerk the second time. If you’re the kind of compulsive jerk that gets yourself banned, yet are able to return with a new persona that doesn’t exhibit jerkish behavior and therefore evade the notice of the moderators, well, I guess you win. Of course, you’ll probably eventually slip up and get yourself outed and get banned again, but maybe you’re such a smooth customer that it will never happen. Of course, if you’re such a smooth customer, why didn’t you display that smoothness the first time?
Do ISP’s ever do that anymore? Assign one IP # to a single user? I thought they all used rotation systems so they don’t need vast amounts of numbers. I know AOL always gave me a different IP address, and my cable modem changes every time I turn off its power.
I dunno. That’s what TPTB always say in these threads. And on the forums my friends and I started in high school, there were only a few IP addresses that corresponded with people’s home networks and then the school network.
I guess I should have quoted the poster above me so that now that his post was deleted I wouldn’t look like a random idiot.
We use any method that works. We use IP’s, we use advanced computer programs that analyze words used and compare them to previous users, we use ouija boards, …er, uh, strike that last one.
To answer a question by your previous incarnation, now removed, we keep removing posts by banned posters to discourage them from returning. It actually seems to work much of the time. But that assumes the poster has a moral compass that operates within “normal” tolerances. There’s no accounting for the throught processes of people who see life outside of “normal.”
Why would a poster come back oh, say, over 200+ times, under a different name? Sense of community? Mentally unbalanced?
But that causes me to ask a question of you–why do you have the right to return under different names, when you paid for years to have one? What makes you special? Why couldn’t you post all of your mundane, pointless comments under your paid name? Why create alter egos? If you want to criticize the Board and it’s administration and moderation, why not do it under your paid name? The one in good standing for seven years. We don’t ban posters for criticizing us. We may get testy from time to time, but we don’t ban you for that. Why do you continue to do this? Why did/do you continue to do this? I’d truly like to know.
I was actually lying about that. (That we use such a program). \
There really is such a program, and it allowed a scholar to analyze the poem “The Night Before Christmas” and conclude that Clement Moore did NOT come up with that poem, but rather stole it from another author.
Just so y’all know: samclem has repeatedly failed the Turing test. That test, unaccountably, does not take into consideration whether a machine’s capability to demonstrate thought includes pre-ordering beer, booze, and babes (of whatever gender) for moderator “symposiums”. We mods do take that into consideration, and therefore have not pulled the plug.
