Because they won’t know it’s about them specifically.
The last part of your sentence is the entire point: if they get satisfaction, they are more likely to return. And being disappeared without a trace is less likely to give satisfaction than being able to see what a mess they’ve made. The policy is intended to provide a disincentive for a troll to come back as a sock.
Look, we haven’t done a scientific study of troll behavior. But in my experience as a mod, under present procedures few trolls that have their posts promptly disappeared appear to come back. The trolls that tend to come back are the ones that have managed to hang around for a time and provoked some train wrecks and discussion of their behavior before being banned. Some of those can be quite persistent.
You’re free to believe whatever you want about troll behavior. But we’ve dealt with hundreds of trolls, and probably have a better sense of what makes them tick.
To clarify, in my OP I was considering my question from the perspective of the mods. In other words, I felt it would be easier on the mods if the question/answer were made public (and done just once) thereby decreasing the number of PMs they have to deal with while at the same time informing the community.
I didn’t really consider the feed-the-trolls aspect.
That said, what about other, non-troll queries? Why must these be private?
mmm
What I’d like to see is a subforum of ATMB that is accessible only by paid members in good standing. For which things like trolls and other board minutia could be discussed privately.
As a poster who doesn’t care enough to PM a moderator, but is sometimes curious about such things, your statement could be taken as a challenge.
Sadly, this is the attitude we see in most of these “Do things MY WAY!” threads questioning the moderation of the board.
There is no point at which the (voluntary, unpaid) moderators are required to explain things in great detail and justify their decisions and actions to any single individual or handful of members. Doing so is presuming upon their time (unpaid, remember) and your power and influence (minuscule if any) on this board.
Except, as I said, very few people actually care enough to inquire.
Such as? The vast majority of disappeared threads and posts and unannounced bannings involve spam and trolls and their socks. The particular case you inquired about recently and that seems to have prompted this was a subject that we preferred to handle privately. Other cases involve privacy or confidentiality issues.
PMs already serve that function.
As I said, I am perfectly happy to have people PM me.
Most spam that gets through is posted by humans, who are able to respond to captchas and avoid filters and other blocks. But we are mainly talking about trolls. Socks are created by both banned spammers and trolls.
Not exactly the same function. A private forum with threads operates differently than personal messages. For example, you and I were to exchange a series of PMs, no else would know. If we were to discuss something in a private forum, anyone with access to that forum could listen in.
The moderators. I simply meant paid members who had posting privileges.
Of course, it’d be even better if we could exclude post-millennium posters, since we '99-ers are clearly superior.
Huh. You mean those links with semi-possible subject heds, which contain only links to soccer streams, eg, are actually typed in by some poor bastard paid by an agency somewhere?
