This thread here was closed by What Exit.
All the posts are gone and What Exit said it was merged into some wacky-ass thread … but that thread appears to not exist. So the thread and all the posts were effectively cornfielded. Why?
I explained in another ATMB thread, it was started by a troll, revived by probably the sock of the same troll and attracts socks.
So it went into the cornfield this time.
So that stray trace of it is gone too.
Thank you
This seems a poor decision, in my opinion. There was a lot of very good information in that thread, assuming it’s the one I am thinking about. I really liked how posters who usually disagree were working together.
Why not leave the non-troll posts in the thread but lock it so there are no more replies? I believe that is how this situation has been handled in the past.
I also think it was a bad decision.
It was a long thread that had been running for many months, and there were plenty of excellent and interesting posts, particularly by lawyers with experience of sovcits.
Apparently there was no problem with the thread during all the months it was active.
Does this mean that any thread that gets trolled can be cornfielded, no matter how old it is, and no matter how many good posts by established posters there are?
If there’s a thread where the OP was a troll or sock, and there are half a dozen replies, and it’s cornfielded the same day, no problem. But this was excessive and unnecessary in my opinion.
I think it was a mistake. If you want to cornfield a thread started by a troll, it should be done in the first few days. If it is a good thread that has been going on for a while with lots of quality posts, then after a certain point does it matter how it got started?
I agree with this, I wish the thread could have been saved. How many sock posts were there? Baby with the bathwater and all that.
If you are corn-fielding someones posts, do you have to do it one post at a time or can you do something like all their posts at once or all their posts in a particular thread at once?
The software tools were glitchy the other night and 3 threads got trashed. I caught one when it happened and one was brought to my attention and I fixed it.
This one was a huge mess and started by probably the American troll under a different sock.
I can’t really fix this one and don’t really want to in this case.
But it wasn’t something likely to happen again.
It never happened any other time but Friday night and glitched 3 timed Friday.
I saw it was the PC games and sovereign citizen threads, what was the third one?
Don’t remember, a smallish one that I restored almost immediately.
So because of some socks, you had to nuke it from orbit? Maybe I missed it but the socks didn’t really seem to derail the thread.
On the one hand, keeping the thread is rewarding the socks by having the topic exist, a topic that wouldn’t have existed if the sock hadn’t broken the rules in posting here.
On the other hand, deleting the thread punishes everyone who participated in the thread and was interested in the topic and wanted to discuss it.
If it was up to me (and it’s not, I’m nobody) I would try to judge whether a topic was only continuing because of a sock’s input. If the thread is all replies to the sock, or if the topic otherwise hadn’t gained its own momentum absent contributions from the sock, then maybe it’s worth getting rid of. But if the topic involved non-socks interacting with each other and fueling the discussion then it seems a disservice to those people to kill it just because a sock started it. That in itself is empowering a sock by disrupting the board, a clever way to troll people.
But again, just my opinion.
Just an outside observation: anti-sock sentiment here is almost fanatical. I understand that in the golden age of message boards, sock puppetry was a major problem. Or at least it could be on certain types of boards.
But is it still such a danger in these declining days that forbidding any “rewarding” of socks by talking about them or leaving their threads open serves a useful purpose?
Yeah, I frankly don’t get it. Letting people troll from socks isn’t good for the message board, and letting banned posters bypass bans with socks isn’t good either. But lots of popular message boards function just fine with socks and things of that nature. I don’t even think we should get rid of the no socks rule, but treating sock puppetry like the crime of Herostratus–who in addition to being sentenced to death, was also sentenced to being forgotten, as the authorities criminalized any mention of his name. But we still know it 2000 years later, so part of it didn’t work that well.
Healthy discussion forums are about engaging, interesting discussions. There is really no reason to delete large sections of threads just because of sock puppetry, nor is there really much reason to even delete sock posts. The natural flow of a thread will keep going after the sock is banned, and it isn’t frankly a big deal. If the thread was already producing quality content in spite of the sock, then it’s evidence the sock’s posts weren’t really causing that much trouble.
Blatant trolling / inappropriate content obviously is a different matter.
I feel like the weird “let’s disappear all their posts, and many of the posts of our own real posters, that’ll teach the socks!” in fact just helps the socks damage the board, because you wipe out good discussions with the stupid zealotry.
I feel like a lot of this probably dated back to some long-retired or deceased moderator who one day said “we’re going to fix sock puppetry by disappearing them”, and for some reason that’s written in a tablet of gold somewhere and now can never be changed.
But fear you not, the mods have made clear that one thing they don’t give a fuck about is the future of the board, they give a fuck about being little petty moderators of a little petty board, and always finding an excuse for their mismanagement.
Going by what others have said about the discussion being interesting and effort spent debating non-socks in good faith, I would have just closed it, IMO. It will drop off the recent page and into oblivion, but the good arguments would still be available for reference to anybody seeking them out. And a clear “banned: socking” label next to the sock’s username would let anybody know he or she is not going to respond if you quote them in a new topic.
But I have not actually read the topic.
~Max
Moderator Note
If this were true, you would be banned right now. Instead, I am just going to remind you that hostility towards the staff is not permitted. You can’t Pit mods for their moderation and you cannot attack mods Pit-style in ATMB. Please dial it back.
Jeebus Christ, I said, if you actually read all my posts, I made a mistake based on a glitch and felt that due to the work it would take to bring it back and that it was only bumped by the probable sock of the troll that started the thread it wasn’t worth the friggin effort it would take. No major decision was made. A glitch happened.
You want to accuse me of being lazy, fine. But it is lazy not to read all my posts in this thread too. There was only 3 of them.
It really would take a lot to try and undo the glitch. I’m not willing to try.
On the one hand the thread was started by a troll and kept alive by a troll, on the other hand there are numerous other threads on the same subject available or a new one minus socks/trolls could be started easily enough.
What to do, what to do.
I didn’t realize that it might be difficult to undo from your other posts. In that case leaving it cornfielded sounds more reasonable.
~Max
Happy Birthday.
Thank you.
It makes more sense from that perspective; the thread was ruined by a glitch and it’s a pain in the ass to fix it. You then toss “oh and a sock created it” as the icing, not the cake itself, I totally get it.