Should able2know ban people for having untoward opinions?

What kind of rules against "trolls" would not proscribe a lot of your attacks on members? I'm not being facetious here, I really do find it astounding that you think that there is a way to objectively codify and proscribe their behavior while not proscribing yours.

If you can insult people why can't "trolls"? Or do you just not see personal insults as a hallmark of trolling?

No, i don't. I consider that willful disruption of a discussion (and often, ironically, i think that proceeds from offense taken at opinions which have been expressed). Someone here once said that there was a lot of historical evidence for the existence of the putative Jesus (putative being, of course, my term). I said "not to put too find a point on it, bullshit." That member responded in a truly hysterical manner, claiming that it was a personal attack to refer to the statement as bullshit. Thereafter, the qualityof that member's posts deteriorated rapidly. The member began to refer to me and others consistently with really vile epithets. I don't cosider that i was responsible for that member's decision to respond to criticism of the content of that member's post with personally directed and scurrilous epithets. Now, i simply don't read its posts--problem solved. If there is a "flame war" going on, it's all on one side.

Once again, although i don't claim to have an answer to your problem, not having an answer doesn't disqualify me from pointing out that there is a problem.

By the way, although i can't recall what the thead is, i have stated already that i consider the only reasonable basis for banning someone to be death threats or excessively cruel behavior. I don't know if the exchange in the rape thread would qualify as excessively cruel behavior, because i didn't read the exchange, and i'm certainly not going to go back to read it. I did see, though, that the accused now claims not to have understood that the member posting was also the victim described. It's a difficult call, and that i don't have all the answers shouldn't disqualify me for calling for one to be found.

I'd actually settle for just pointing out what exactly you see is the problem, even if you don't think you have a solution. I hadn't thought you had had much of a problem with thread disruptions, for example. You'd mentioned being able to scroll past them with ease, and not even wanting to programmatically ignore them, so I'm curious as to how much of a problem you see and what nature it is (e.g. is it disruption specifically? Or general post quality?).

I don't really think there's a problem. You jumped on comments i made in regard to Abuzz. I was saying that Abuzz went to hell because there was no moderation at all. That's not the case here.

Hmm I posted that the story of a woman being beaten constantly by a husband for the “crime” of not reaching an orgasm did not make sense to me as any woman could pretend to reach such an event whether she had or have not done so.

I was dealing as far as I was aware at the time with a stand-alone posting when I wrote that comment.

I had not taken note that the poster was either the same person who had claimed that she had been sadly a victim of two completely separated sexual assaults in her life or that once more she was talking about herself.


I also had already stated if I had been aware that the poster who was claiming to be a victim of others assaults was also talking abut herself I would had not posted my questioning of this event.

However if questioning a posted story that does not made sense to you is a banning offense you are going end up with a very dull website indeed as a result.

Once more if I did cause any pain to a rape victim that already had far more pain in her life then anyone else could dream of having then I am very sorry for so doing and it was not my intent to do so.

I'll repond to you just long enough to point out that i consider you an idiot and have no interest in your self-justification or anything else that you have to write. So, don't waste your time addressing me.

I agree with this, unless of course it can't be and I do think certain problems, by the very nature of them, do not have solutions.

For example, there is a concept in engineering called the project triangle. It aims to easily illustrate more complex incompatibility than mere mutual incompatibility because it's often not clear that certain criteria is diametrically opposed to each other. So the classic example of "Good, fast, cheap. Pick two." aims to illustrate that you can't have it all.

Likewise I don't think we can have it all and some of the problems you have may just not have a solution that doesn't cause its own problems that are themselves inacceptable to you. And if you can't think of a solution it may be due to a fundamental conflict of interest that no other mind is going to be able to resolve.

As a topical example (not one that you called for), we can't have both a free marketplace of ideas and no idiots. And another of our triangles is something like "consistency", "capacity for common sense" and "scale". That is, one person can easily moderate a small forum without very well codified rules and with an emphasis on personal judgement. But this won't scale, and relying on heavy use of personal judgment and interpretation with multiple moderators will increase the inconsistency (i.e. unfairness) of their moderation.

So as an example, OB has mentioned that we should differentiate between insults to "****" and insults to "innocents" and while he keeps telling me how obvious it is I think he is trying to appeal to my personal judgement, which is not how the site runs (I do not do the majority of the moderation, and am merely one of the public faces to moderation). So we need rules, and the more specific a rule is the easier it is to apply consistently, while rules open to wide interpretation (like OB's suggestions) are much more difficult to do so.

Other conflicts are the desire to have a free marketplace of ideas, and the desire for the product within this marketplace to be of higher quality. There is a fundamental conflict between the freedom of the marketplace and the regulation necessary to curate its wares. Open is diametrically opposed to curation.

So depending on just what the perceived problem may be, there may be no solution that does not inexorably compromise other ideals to an unacceptable degree.

I do know at least this: it is impossible to please everyone, and even quite difficult to completely please just one person on a forum. On some level I think a degree of perceived problems is inevitable (i.e. no solution to all problems) so we'll always have problems of some sort, and it's just a matter of balancing the different problems and how acutely they affect the forum because solving a problem for one person will almost always create a problem for someone else at this size.

Well the lady in question have every right to be upset with me and I will extend my offer to Robert to leave at his request to both her and her daughter who I understand is also on this website.

I had thought about describing a site of which i know, which is very successful in its venue, and in which not only does every forum have one or more moderators, but the moderators are identified on the forum list page. I immediately rejected the notion, though, precisely because of scale. It probably doesn't even have 10,000 members over the roughly 15 years it has existed, most of those are inactive, and only, perhaps, fewer than a thousand are active at any given time (probably a generous estimate). The last i knew of, their biggest day was about 500 members and about a thousdand lurkers--that was September 12, 2001.

Precisely because of scale, i doubt that there needs to be any change made which could reasonably be expected not to cause more problems than it solves. But then, this thread was really always about O'Bill whining. I'd say, even just from the comments here, that most members are OK with how this works.

In that case you can ignore my next post (though I do explain a concept that I think some might find illuminating).

Abuzz certainly did have problems but it was a lot bigger than just moderation. I can't think of one thing Abuzz did right during my stay there.

They blocked all topic pages from search engines, making their membership stagnant when they removed the promotions from NYTimes etc. They had no security at all. You could create an account with a fake email address (no verification), you could create an account with someone else's username (and change it as often as you wanted) and you could even make other people post things they did not say (I found a way that you could email someone and just by them opening the email it would post what you wanted to abuzz).

There were a lot of problems there, and lack of moderation was only the tip of it. Taking the promos down from NYTimes and not having any other way of attracting new members to replace turnover was what I think the biggest mistake (not really a mistake, they were giving up so it was intentional) they made was. For some strange reason they didn't want their content in search engines, so once those links were down there was no new blood and bad blood boiled over.

No, that was interesting. Some of those things i knew, others i did not know. But you know, if there had been a genuine commitment to making the site work, moderation would have identified a lot of those problems, and at least provided an opportunity to find a solution.

By the way, one gets caught up in a discussion, and often responds less precisely than one intends. I don't really think there are problems here which it would be reasonable to expect that you could solve. My remark about being able to identify problems even if i don't have a solution referred to the Abuzz debacle.

Yeah, Abuzz didn't go down unintentionally. It was given up on intentionally, moderation was just a symptom.

Another big thing abuzz got wrong that I forgot to mention, which is also very relevant to the genesis of this thread, was that they did not filter votes by IP at all. Here the sock puppets have to come up with a new IP for every new vote, there anyone could vote as many times as they want with incredible ease.

Cannot the IP address be spoofed?

Yeah, but it's much harder to find a large volume and to switch the IP so many times so it makes a huge difference (I think most votes here would be sock puppet votes without it but I think the current amount is less than a hundredth of a percent). It's similar to the difference it would be for a site to allow a single user to vote multiple times versus having to have two accounts (even on one IP). Very few people care enough to switch accounts and fewer still to switch IPs and IPs are scarce (there are around 4 billion total IPv4 IP addresses available in the world and we are projected to run out of those in about a year) while email addresses aren't, making availability to the end user very different (i.e. any user can setup 100 accounts, but nearly all would be very hard-pressed to find 100 IP addresses to use).

In any case have other deterrents planned that will make it even more difficult to do (e.g. requiring account history etc for votes to count towards the totals) and rerun all the vote counting to retroactively remove the effect of the sock puppet votes but automatically discarding multiple votes from the same IP is a world of a difference.

heres how Larry King handled it in his interview with Dr. Laura Scheißkopf



non N-person Larry, so you call them N-People, interesting

i'm shocked the J-people* who run the media were cool with that



*or would that be K-people, language is so confusing

Scheißkopf?

Sure

dys would call them poopity heads

This method with code encluded had been released to created a cookie that is very very hard to removed.

The only good way of dealing with it is to used sandboxie and wipe the sandbox or a full VPN and wipe the VPN.

evercookie -- never forget.
October 11, 2010: Reported on the front page of the New York Times

DESCRIPTION
evercookie is a javascript API available that produces
extremely persistent cookies in a browser. Its goal
is to identify a client even after they've removed standard
cookies, Flash cookies (Local Shared Objects or LSOs), and
others.

evercookie accomplishes this by storing the cookie data in
several types of storage mechanisms that are available on
the local browser. Additionally, if evercookie has found the
user has removed any of the types of cookies in question, it
recreates them using each mechanism available.

Specifically, when creating a new cookie, it uses the
following storage mechanisms when available:
- Standard HTTP Cookies
- Local Shared Objects (Flash Cookies)
- Silverlight Isolated Storage
- Storing cookies in RGB values of auto-generated, force-cached
PNGs using HTML5 Canvas tag to read pixels

Robert here is the link with the code and you can even place such a cookie on your system to see how hard it is to removed at this site.

http://samy.pl/evercookie/