I’d like to know why this message board is so vulnerable to socks and trocks. With so many intelligent people here, it seems odd that any random screwball with an email account can cause so much trouble.
I’d be delighted to read a thorough explanation, but the fact is I don’t know squat about the technology involved.
So, if anyone wants to respond, feel free to provide that explanation, but I think it’d be better to interpret this post as a suggestion (from a tech-ignorant poster) to implement more stringent access requirements. Verification or something.
In my uninformed WAG I suppose that it is a matter of resources, both human resources and economic ones. All of the moderators are over-worked volunteers. There is a position for administrator, which may or may not be paid, but I believe that position is still unfilled since the previous (very well liked) occupant died. And any sort of automated procedure would probably cost more money than is available (which, as near as I can tell from comments from those who know, approaches zero). They can’t even get the membership payment system working, so I don’t know if there is any money coming in at all.
The other intelligent people here, some of the members/users, might presumably volunteer to help in some way, but such offers have generally not been accepted before. I have always supposed that there were issues of system security getting in the way.
These are my WAGs, and just the first answer, so stay tuned for more informed replies.
I’m not in the loop since I’m not a moderator, but the impression I got was that we actually get fairly few socks or trocks. We’re a fairly obscure message board.
FYI: There are a group of people with longstanding grudges against the board, who have congregated in other parts of the internet since the early 2000s. Some have tech skills, so an absolute bar isn’t viable. Sad!
Sock puppeting isn’t a bannable offense on other forums. Nor is trolling.
Maybe we "have* trocks because we bother to ban that kind of behavior, in the sense thay you don’t have murderers if you don’t have a law against murder.
Not really. Have you seen the stuff on other message boards and especially what’s on various social media sites these days?
This is correct. While we do get the occasional sock/troll, they aren’t that common.
I’m not going to say exactly what we use to catch socks/trolls/spammers/etc (we don’t want to make it easier for them to get around the automated stuff), but we do have some things in place. Some of it isn’t automatic and we have to go digging, which most of us don’t have time to do unless someone reports a problematic poster.
Trocks usually out themselves fairly quickly. Also, the more they sock up and return, the more “tells” they give us about their behavior which makes them easier to detect.
Also, another big issue is that we don’t want to make it difficult for new users to join us. Message boards have been in decline for years now. A lot of boards have completely died. We’re lucky to still be here. The last thing we want to do is reduce the number of new users that we get. We need more, not less.
Moderators aren’t involved in the financial side of things at all, so in many ways we are guessing as much as you are. But I have heard a few comments here and there that make me think we’re lucky to be able to keep the lights on right now.
Anything involving a significant financial investment probably isn’t going to happen.
You sure that’s what would happen? I’d think that, given the state of things online, people would be drawn to the SDMB if they thought things are better here.
I’ve seen some real atrocities on other message boards, which is why I’m here, so this one doesn’t seem to me to be particularly vulnerable. My use of the word “so” might have given most of you that impression.
Maybe I started this thread by asking about a problem that’s not really such a problem.
It’s very common there to make “throwaway accounts” to post things that are controversial or where you want to retain some anonymity. Our ban is definitely a loss in some aspects. Whether it’s a net loss I couldn’t say.
Yeah, I havent noticed many- altho of course many posters are accused of being trolls in the Pit as someone disagrees with them.
And there seems to be less spammers. I used to report one every so often, no more.
How would they know “things are better” if they are new?
It is true, no other board I post in has anything like the Pit. That being said, this is just about the only general board I use, the others are specialized in D&D, my profession, hobbies, local news & such, etc.
Compared to the dumpster fire that is the entire rest of social media this is a very clean meeting place with an occasional crumb under one dining chair.
Yeah, I guess that’s true. I dunno, hoping it might give someone else a viable idea.
Oh man, we’re obviously very different people. If it weren’t for The Pit, I’d tell more people about this message board. I think it’s an embarrassment.
Both of these seem to go in waves. I’m often active on the board late at night, and that’s typically been when I’ve seen (and reported) both trocks and spammers.
In the case of the former, what I’ve seen, in the past, is a “new poster” proceeding to spam various threads with nasty/hateful posts in the wee hours. I report them (and I assume others do, too), and they get banned and cornfielded as soon as a mod is available to deal with them.
My impression is that our sock/trock issue is no more than a handful of banned members, who get their jollies by coming back to stir up crap from time to time.
The spammers that I see are also typically in the middle of the night; I’m guessing it’s because 1 a.m. Central U.S. time is the middle of the day in Asia.
And, as far as this board goes, the trocks seem to be mostly, if not entirely, banned members who create a sock account specifically to come back and troll the board.