Aw man, S-A-W was a puppet as well as an ()*()? Didn't know Cydney had an alter-ego also, but she just came across as kinda batty until she went ape on that lawyer dude. Anyway, to join in the toadying, this forum seems pretty well run to me. The last writing forum I was on (which folded last summer) was pretty much unregulated, but the admin was an absentee landlord who seemed to have lost interest in the project, and I don't think he'd given his mods any actual power to ban anyone, the most they ever seemed to do was remove the occasional post. I'd half made up my mind to try and get banned for troll-busting, but then the place shut up shop, so I moved here instead. Good forum, happy Iain.
She had several that she was operating as two independent groups in two seperate conversations.... And when she went ape on that attorney, that's actually another red-flag for possible puppets, the member unconcerned about sacrificing one incarnation because there's another in reserve. Again, it's not always the easiest thing to spot, and the level of subterfuge in play (a.k.a. premeditation) and the difficulty in spotting/dealing with it is why this is a banning offense pretty much everywhere, no allowances, no steps for corrective action.
Being relatively new around here, I feel a certain sense of reservation about expressing any opinions (good or bad) about what other members write, but there was definitely something off center about some of the interactions I read. Made me a little nervous about spending time here. (wrote as in tongue & cheeky) The funniest sock puppet act I have ever witnessed was on a car forum. One guy actually had worked at Volvo all his life and for some freakin' reason also collected & restored old Volvos in his spare time, so he eventually developed two profiles. The admins were totally privy to this and let it go because it was so entertaining to have this guy debate the business side of the topic with his enthusiastic puppet who innocently displayed a "puppy love" approach to freakin' cars and was often scolded & sarcastically schooled. The fact that this guy was a good writer really made this fun. Needless to say some of the noobies were very concerned and nervous about how crazy the abuse got between the two profiles. The older members had a blast with this.
I was banned from another forum for abandoning one user name account, never to use it again, and creating another. Not sock-puppetry in my opinion, but ... I'm not sure if that would get me banned here, since The Rules specifically ban sock-puppets. I also think the mods here do a great job of balancing freedom and potential chaos.
The software has a way of showing me these kinds of accounts. Most of the members who fall into this list are clearly innocent of anything. All one has to do is look at the dates of logins for Account A vs. Account B and one can easily intuit when a member has either forgotten they ever had an account here or lost their old password and created another account, etc. When Account A has no history of corrective action to it and has been fallow for a while before Account B comes into play, it's easy to parse. When I see this I usually just merge the information from the old to the new account. Very often the old account doesn't even have any history; it was a "lurker" account. Important to note: This same list also shows me when a member is just trying to run away from previously shitty behavior (banned or not) by donning the guise of a "new member". I can see everything. Nothing is hidden from me.
The great oz knows all and see's all - just so you aren't being operated from inside by a tiny balding magician
There aren't too many things that will get you banned as a go-to summary judgement. Most of them are things that would seem obvious. And - please don't hear this the wrong way - but I cannot imagine anyone less likely than you to get banned. You have to really earn it. I know it never seems that way in the eyes of the recipient, and I know that there are places on the internet where it seems to happen at random, but I would rather people get pissed at me for being overly tolerant than randomly callous. But... Sometimes things happen behind the scenes that do make it seem kinda' random, yes. One of the most common things is for a mod or myself to issue a simple warning to a member and then for that member to respond a la Samuel L. Jackson in the What Does Marcellus Wallace Look Like? scene. It happens. And sadly, the member thinks we're going to respond like Brad from the same scene. No, no, no. This is the reason the staff always issues warnings with all of us included in the warning PM, for the sake of transparency. When someone decides to go postal for being checked, then it needs to be seen by all of us as to why this lead to a banning since this isn't something that would normally be visible the way it is when in open forum. The mod team is not a punching bag and I do not expect them to have to just put up with that.
You'd be amazed, man. Simply editing a post after taking a swipe at someone. Yeah... like we don't have access to all post edits. (smh)
Yeah I've had people say they never typed what they typed, and I say "Dude, I'm looking right at it."
"No you're not; I deleted it!" "Your admission of guilt notwithstanding, nothing is ever actually deleted."
IMO editing something after realising it was a bit out of order is fine (if i do it i usually put a note to say its self moderated) - its the then lying about it "No I never miss , it wasn't me a big boy did it and ran away" schtick that gets tiresome That aside on the 'what gets you banned thing" the sign of a good well run forum is when the answer is "Flagrantly and/ or repeatedly breaking the simple clearly stated rules" , while the sign of a bad one is when its " because the mods/admin/their clique of special friends don't agree with your opinion" It goes without saying that IMO WF falls in the former category
"No No , It wasn't me , I left my computer logged on and my brother/son/friend/unusually gifted labrador must have written those hateful things on my account" yeah definitely , and we also believe that "the dog ate your homework "and that "your check is in the mail"
I'm a member of another forum, nothing to do with writing, where a mod accused a member of being a rebel " ... like Spartacus." Within a few minutes everyone, and I mean everyone, who was logged-on had changed their avatar to Spartacus and posted "I'm Spartacus!", "No! I'm Spartacus!" It was a hoot and the whole thing eventually blew over.
I agree. The particular problem the last few years has layered onto communities like ours where the nature of the venue makes for a very broad engagement of topics is that there is "that brand" of individual who feels that his/her behavior and/or breaking of the rules is always trumped by his/her holy right to express a point view, no matter the mode, method, or manner of said expression. Having an opinion these days has been wholly confused with being an asshole by certain extreme ends of any take on a matter. Doesn't matter of that take is Left or Right, since these days Left and Right is not a line, but a circle with Moderates at one end and Lefties and Righties (now very difficult to distinguish one from the other) at the other side of the circle.
IMO assholes have always had that confusion - it goes hand in hand with "how dare you delete my post you Nazi" I've always thought that people who get bent out of shape over being moderated should move somewhere like North Korea in order to understand what the lack of freedom of speech really means If a mod deletes my post I generally assume its because either a) I was being a bit of a cock , or b) the person I was disagreeing with was being a bit of a cock and my post made no sense once their post was , or both
IP bans would definitely help prevent banned members from returning. However, it comes with a major problem: IP addresses are dynamic, they change over time (even though it doesn't happen all too often). This means that if we ban a certain IP address to keep someone from returning after a ban, then someone else might be unlucky and get that IP address at a later point and can suddenly no longer access the forum at all (even though they have neither been banned nor done anything bad). So when members are banned from WF we almost never (to my knowledge) administer IP bans.
to be fair 10-15 years ago you'd have been right - back then i was a mod on a wildlife forum and IP bans were one of our main weapons against the persistent troll - but that was before mobile IP (which on some services change every time you log on) and before anonymiser services that hide the IP behind a rerouted facade. On Barryboys ( a site dedicated to taking the piss out of badly modified cars) the troll problem got so bad that the admins blocked webmail from being used to sign up , meaning that people more or less had to use their real emails (of course there are ways round that too but they are more arduous)
Sadly, the Troll Tribe is an ever evolving culture unto itself, which I am sure delights the dickens out of psychology and psychiatry majors across the land who now have fresh material for their dissertations. In a previous thread on this topic another member made a comment that issues like these are impossible to control, which is to a certain extent true, but I would say that its really eradication of the problem that's impossible, not control. Control is a matter of maintenance, if not necessarily a cure. Trolls will always pop up. We are here to keep them in check. I even had a member once argue to me that someone could get banned, change their IP, change their location, re-register and then fly under the radar, thus circumventing the ban. If the member does this and indeed "flies under the radar", then the needful thing has been accomplished; the person has modified his/her behavior so as to now fall within the set parameters. He or she may feel like they've scored a "win", but the win is really mine since all I ever want is for people to play nice.
Off-topic. This made me think. Is there somewhere we can see stats for forum use? Like percentages of a particular forum use? But thankfully they don't really know how computers and devices work. It is so easy to mask yourself if you want. I don't mask IP when here, but my component ID is never real.
I wish! This is actually something I researched a while back because it would be a very useful tool for me in making decisions about contentious members that are not always cut and dry. I have always espoused the idea that a member's contribution to the forum venue needs to be weighed against whatever issues come up. I'm going to make different decisions for a member who contributes most of the their time to, say, giving crit in the Workshop vs. a member who spends most of their time participating in the Debate Room. If the software gave me a percentage of use by subforums this would be awesome, but it doesn't. It's possible to do this very manually by really flexing the normal search function open to everyone (total pain in the ass to do, but I've done it), but there's no structured report of this kind offered by the software.