@OCCOM BILL,
OCCOM BILL wrote:The fact remains that whatever Brooke or anyone else did to correct the damage done by the troll was necessary only because Robert Gentel caters to trolls in the first place. Even now you're leveling all of your disdain at those who reacted to trolling, rather than the trolls themselves. =
Righteous crusades, duplicitous sock puppetry and hypocritical accusations are just as disruptive to the site as the trolling. What is the difference between Brooke using dozens of IP addresses and accounts to vote down and taunt BillRM and BillRM being an annoying nuisance? Really just which side you favor, objectively the behavior is similarly disruptive.
Brooke created her first sock puppet before any that might have been BillRM anyway, it wasn't a reaction to that if that is the excuse and quite frankly I have quite generalized distain for forum pettiness right now. BillRM's inability to demonstrate any social graces is as annoying to me as the folk who demonstrate no ability to avoid granting it center stage. The notion that Brooke is somehow justified in abusing the community this way is arrant nonsense.
At the same time I reread your reports, I was wrong to say your ideas are all bad, I was focused on your demands to ban Bill and Hawkeye and the rude followups you sent telling us it was not "cool" that we had not taken your demanded action, but in that report are a couple of perfectly legitimate suggestions and yes though you seem to have had the wrong culprit in mind there simply is a significant amount of systemic abuse here that I must now deal with it. I apologize for being so frustrated with you, but at the same time I am going to continue to reject the demands to ban the people on your shortlist. We can't run this site on the basis of lynchings and any rule that would ban those on your list would invariably catch a lot of other members in the sweep. I'm just not going to play that authoritarian game and you can either come to terms with that or not.
I admit to going off on you unfairly Bill, but with you would notice that an objective application of this would result in banning Brooke right now, there is a possibility BillRM used around 5 fake accounts but I am virtually certain that Brooke has used over a dozen predating any of the other sock puppet accounts.
So in regard to using a ban hammer I still disagree, Brooke remains unbanned (some of the sock puppets were banned but I really don't have time for this kind of game). I would rather appeal to reasonableness than spend a bunch of time playing whack-a-mole with people with no life.
Ultimately here is the deal, creating such sock puppet accounts is something that we clearly must act against and we are willing to permanently ban accounts for. You guys doing it are not covering your tracks to the degree that you think you are and I will now have to spend time building in more fraud protection to detect you with a greater degree of certainty.
I don't have time to fix all these fake votes and play this game, but if it continues I will make time for it and permanently ban the orignal accounts generating the sock puppets. We will also be moving the voting overhauls up in priority (after which we will re-calculate all votes and discard all the newly-detected sock puppet votes), which is a damned pity because it represents work that does nothing to improve the site except to protect it from such childish sock puppetry.
More lies from he who caters to trolls. No reaction to trolling is the cause of same, Robert. This thread has seen every method of dealing with trolls fail, from confrontation to ignoring, and now you're even alleging sock-puppet voting... none of it did anything to discourage the trolls. You continue to make an ass of yourself by blaming the people disgusted by trolls instead of the disgusting trolls themselves.