Alright, how about through Cecil’s columns and some text explaining what the SDMB is about and, more importantly, what won’t be tolerated here and the reason for more stringent access? Would that work?
If it’s not worth pursuing, I’ll drop it. Just thinking out loud, in case it’s useful.
The glossary of SDMB-specific terms is here. You can also get to it through the Registration, Rules, and FAQ post pinned to the top of ATMB.
Other than the brief run of new SD columns which Cecil did here a few months ago (and which, I don’t think, were ever publicized beyond the SDMB), there hasn’t been a Straight Dope column which appeared in newspapers (or even on the Straight Dope website) since 2018.
I meant the published columns. The ones that drew us to this site.
There aren’t any anymore, as I noted. The only place they exist is in archive form, on StraightDope.com.
Well, I don’t want to insist. Obviously, I’m suggesting an overhaul of this place, but, as I’ve said, I’m really just thinking out loud. I’m not here to raise a fuss. If there’s not really a reason to complain about socks/trocks, there’s no reason for a big change. Unless it wouldn’t really be so big and would attract new users.
Man, we’re just getting used to Discourse here. No overhauls for like ten years or something. Minimum.
I spent over a decade dealing with socks over on Wikipedia as an administrator. I was a very active sock puppet investigator. (Yes, SPI is a real thing there.) The SDMB is nothing special in that regard. The question in the OP is like asking why a house is so vulnerable to rain since the roof keeps getting wet.
The reason why it’s vulnerable to socks is the same reason every other site is just as vulnerable to them. They will always exist as long as we allow for anonymity. And that is necessary if we actually want, you know, people participating here.
This is like taking the metaphor of a roof getting wet, and proposing you keep it dry by setting it on fire.
A roof is more like a hat than a golf ball is like an egg.
And time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Well, art is art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west, and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce, they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does.
I’d like to see the OP outline what they think should change and how the proposed change will affect our results for the better.
So far I see a couple of vague oblique suggestions about fixing a problem we don’t really seem to have. I’m not trying to be a jerk here; there may genuinely be some good ideas here and I’m trying to tease them out.
Thanks. I figured it was a portmanteau, but a brief web search yielded nothing useful.
It’s all in the OP, including my acknowledgement that I don’t know enough about the technology to understand what can be done. It’s also been established that the consensus is that socks/trocks aren’t actually a problem on this message board, so I’ll consider the matter resolved, unless you’ve got something to say.
I was hoping the thread would lead to conversation among those of you who do understand the technology and are able to contribute something.
We are a Marketplace Of Ideas.
Ideas offend certain people.
Mystery solv-ed.
Selah.
“The technology” to do what exactly? To my mind you’ve still utterly failed to state a case for what you find problematic or given even a vague notion of what a better outcome (not process; outcome) would look like.
If you’re of the habit of using the boards mostly between, say, midnight and 3am central USA time, that’s when all the spammers show up. Who are duly slaughtered at first light by our USA-based mods. Understanding that the automated spammer filters already stop WAG 90+% of the attempts and all the mods see are the fairly few leakers. Those of us who use the Dope during the US business day can go months between seeing spam posts.
If your problem is trolls, well, it’s darn hard to detect someone’s intent ahead of giving them an opportunity to act on their intent. Even if you enacted some sort of kiddie pool where they had to play nice with others for, say, a month before being allowed out with the adults, that would simply slow down the impatient trolls, not the extra aggressive targeted trolls.
One of the things they teach in the software design industry is that you can’t propose a technological solution to a social problem. It’s usually phrased in terms of trying to use automation to impose a disciplined workflow process on a chaotic organization, or to reign in rogue salesmen by using rigorous approvals, or … It. Just. Doesn’t. Work.
To fix the chaotic human process you must engage in human-to-human management to remove the incentives and therefore the desire to operate chaotically. Then automate the resulting non-chaotic reliable bureaucratic process people are already willingly using.
As applied to the publicly-supplied content of social media in general and the Dope in particular, that suggests the way to stop undesirable behavior is to make it unrewarding on a human-to-human level. When trolls and their handiwork simply disappear without a trace, that works. They don’t get their jollies and soon they’re off to more inviting pastures. Yes, it cedes them the first move. But the alternative is to ban everyone until they’ve somehow proven they’re nice. Which is farcically illogical.
Uh-huh. Keep not trying.
Ok. Sorry to be a bother. Cheers!
If it weren’t for The Pit, we’d not have a significant % of the current membership here and that would be an embarrassment.
I don’t think so, but it would be easy enough to test. Just shut down The Pit for “maintenance” for about a week and see what happens.