General Moderation Topic

Accounts are banned every day, most of them spammers or first-timers not worth a mention here. Just today a TERF who tried to de-rail the Quadball topic was banned.

16 Likes

That just means no one who’s been around a while has been banned or given a timeout. New user trolls get banned dozens of times a day, often so fast that most people never even see their posts.

12 Likes

And here I thought we were doing better.

5 Likes

“We” are. Trolls, not so much.

20 Likes

Over time, the site has been doing better. The amount of time that our malicious but sneaky posters have been able to persist here has been steadily and consistently reduced over the years.

19 Likes

The subtle language of exclusion: Identifying the Toxic Speech of Trans-exclusionary Radical Feminists

Perhaps of use.

18 Likes

We’re seeing so many problematic accounts popping up with 2013 - 2014 etc inception dates & no posting history.

Would it make sense to delete accounts that are inactive for over 2-3 years? They can always sign up again.

11 Likes

If we’re considering that, we might want to do something about usernames- if you’re going to delete old user, letting someone else jump on the now vacant handle could be confusing.

7 Likes

It seems like that would punish lurking, though.

6 Likes

Sign up again & lurk?

4 Likes

The number of accounts like this that have been deleted over the years is shocking. Some people were sure they wanted to make a lot of trouble over a long period. This hasn’t been 5-10 but dozens upon dozens over years and years.

9 Likes

Is that a point in favor of @KathyPartdeux’s suggestion?

6 Likes

That is a discourse-level user management thing. The software doesn’t let that happen. I believe this is why Ken has had all accounts inactive for one year require a manual new password upon reactivation, but I believe many of these tick a log-in box frequently.

8 Likes

If there is a user who joined some time ago but never posted they could still be using features like following topics that interest them. Or viewing new posts, etc…

If those users are suddenly posting causing trouble, then in my opinion treat them like all users, flag posts and let the moderators sort it out.

I belong to many hobby forums, some of them I rarely post but do have a posting history and like to follow topics that interest me. I wouldn’t be happy if I lost my following history because my account was removed because I didn’t participate regularly. I also like logging in and seeing new posts since my last visit.

In this forum I don’t even notice a poster’s join date and I rarely look at a poster’s profile.

Has there been a problem, I thought there was just a post talking about how there haven’t been any poster bans in a while and most people were behaving. I haven’t seen any disruptive posts in a while.

3 Likes

They’re really invested in screwing with the very fine mutants who make our lovely community, aren’t they?

6 Likes

Ah, gotcha!

Thanks for the info!

4 Likes

That corresponds to the date given in Wikipedia for the founding of the Russian Internet Research Agency. It would be consistent with the group’s objectives.

13 Likes

See Schitts Creek GIF by CBC

10 Likes

Bigot ar15gunner has been forcibly removed from the premises.

29 Likes

With a username like that, and a profile name like his, who could have ever seen this coming.

I’m kind of to the point where I think discourse should just allow people to permban based on user name / profile name, etc. Some people just tell you what they are on the tin.

13 Likes