Chap wrote: ↑Wed Apr 27, 2022 4:30 pm
Marcus wrote: ↑Wed Apr 27, 2022 2:29 pm
If Shades could make the Herculean effort to keep his word and delete AtlanticMike’s new sock puppet that is currently trashing SParadise, that would be great also. Or is he just waiting for someone to ask this time around? How many times will AtlanticMike be allowed to break this rule?
Unless I have missed something, Dr Shades has delegated such powers to the mods until further notice. So it is to them that your question should be addressed.
I'd like an answer to that question myself, by the way ...
If you have questions for moderators, the best way to get answers is to post in the the thread dedicated to moderator issues or to shoot one of us a DM.
Shades can ban or delete accounts. Mods can ban accounts but have to request to delete them. It turns out there isn't much difference, as deletion and banning aren't functionally that different.
There is no way for the mods to stop a current user from registering a sock. We aren't involved in the process of approving new accounts. Even if we were, the common use of dynamic IP addressing and VPNs means that locating socks by matching IP addresses isn't foolproof. While some internet providers do assign blocks of IP addresses geographically, not all do. And not all that generally do so do it consistently. So, the answer to "how many times will AtlanticMike be allowed to break the rule" is, in all honestly, as often as he decides to do it. We could do an IP ban, which would prevent him from viewing the site. But, to do so, we would have to ban huge ranges of IP addresses used by his internet provider, which is a large, national company. As a consequence, thousands of internet addresses would be unable to view the site. And all Mike would have to do is find another address in his provider's block to manually use or use a VPN to re-access the site.
All we have to identify socks is the internet service provider and the tone and content of posts. The latter is highly subjective. Someone identified Uncle Rico as AM in his first post. In my experience, early guesses like that are often wrong, labeling legitimate posters as socks. But they tend to have an outsized influence on the community's opinion based on garden variety confirmation bias.
So, we are paying attention to new accounts. But, there is a risk-reward tradeoff when it comes to deciding whether an account is a sock. Rather than risking making an early but wrong call, we do our best to look as objectively as we can to satisfy ourselves that we are banning an actual sock and not a new poster who has a style similar to another.
In my perfect world, folks who think they've spotted a sock would just shoot one of us a DM as a heads up. My own opinion is that it's much quicker and easier to spot a sock when people ignore them or interact with them as if they weren't socks. But that's just a personal preference.
We undoubtedly won't apply the ban hammer as quick as some of you would like. I consider that a feature, not a bug.