You’d think that, but yet, experience shows that it works. (People don’t double check to see if they’ve been secretly banned very frequently; you can take it a little further by using cookies/IP addresses to show the thread to the secretly banned computer.)
It works especially well in combination with a “slow” ban, which is not so easily detectable.
Banning people is not a nuclear option for a moderated forum.
Instead of speculating, I invite you to ask around on other forums that have used secret bans, to see how well it’s worked in the past.
This is exactly a thing Jacek would say using one his sock puppets. I’m not saying you’re Jacek. All I’m saying is that, with people like you, Jacek doesn’t need his sock puppets.
Jacek isn’t banned so he definitely doesn’t need his sock puppets. Nor do we need to care about who are his sock puppets. What are you worried about, that someone will hack your brain and destroy your ability to judge personality when the name has changed?
If a troll uses a ‘secret’ sock puppet to post the same sorts of things as his troll account, it’s obvious and therefore not worth fretting over. If a troll uses a sock puppet to spend a portion of his finite time behaving more like a regular user rather than a dickhead – that’s an improvement and a good thing so don’t look a gift horse in the mouth by trying to nail the ‘troll’ persona to the ‘good’ account’s forehead.
The attempt to connect Adam to Jacek identity-wise was ill-advised because even if it had been correct the likeliest outcome would have been that the person behind both accounts stops splitting his efforts and starts trolling full-time.
If you prefer, I can say “Jacek has inexplicably made trolling the IF community his life’s work, and has shown willingness to assume lots of different identities to do it, so I’m not convinced that the sort of thing that works against garden-variety trolls would get him to stop instead of just channeling him to worse behavior under other names. Especially because I’ll give him enough credit to think that he’d realize what was going on.” Though I don’t know how good he is at avoiding IP blocks and the like. (Do I need to deny I’m Jacek’s sock puppet? I think if you look at my far too extensive posting history, it’ll be pretty obvious that I’m not.)
I disagree with Paul about how innocuous sock puppets are in this case, though; it takes a certain amount of attention to start ignoring a new account, and to be drawn into what seems like it might be a worthwhile conversation by someone who then peels off the mask and reveals the same old troll is even more annoying.
Fair enough. The way I parse it, there is no ‘might be a worthwhile conversation’ — either it was or it wasn’t. If something is said worth replying to and I have something I feel is interesting to say in response, then I reply without a care in the world as to who they are ‘secretly’ because I don’t feel it’s relevant. Even if they decide to reveal themselves and laugh at me for being taken in, that doesn’t remove the value I perceived in the earlier part of the conversation. That info is still there. It doesn’t upset me to be ‘pranked’ by a troll into discussing something I found interesting.
I also tend not to put anyone on ignore unless they are personally harassing me and won’t stop targetting me personally, so that’s another data point. I don’t spend any time at all deciding who to put on ignore.
Of course, that is only true for a certain type of conversation. If I spend time helpfully explaining something to you, and you then tear off your mask and joyfully shout that you knew the answer all along, I will certainly be annoyed. As I will be if I have been trying to advise, console, understand, or otherwise relate to you, and you then reveal that you didn’t mean a word of what you were saying. Some conversations are worthwhile because of the human relations involved, not because the content is inherently interesting to you.
Fair points, also. I guess I don’t worry about such stuff since I am not the type of poster who spends a lot of time consoling and relating to others emotionally online. I am really only interested in substantive discussions. (I am not alone in this though; this forum is not exactly buzzing with purely social activity.) As for helping people with solving code problems and technical issues, that I have done, in the few instances where I feel I can and nobody else has. But that is for the benefit of the record, not really for the individual user. If people I don’t know started sending me email queries for tech support that would not become part of a public record, I would not see such service as a smart use of my time unless I can snap off the answer in a one-liner. So I’m not really doing it for the questioner, anyway, I’m doing it to contribute to a community and that contribution cannot be destroyed by someone ending a thread with, ‘Psych!’ 8)
My initial response was to say that “DavidK” was Jacek, but then it occurred to me that this is exactly what Jacek would want us to do. Looking for an external Jacek we keep finding the internal Jacek that lurks within each and every one of us. We think it is the Jacek without we fear, but it is the Jacek within us, a monkey-faced, petty, suspicious dwarf rearing its head from the depths of our souls that terrifies us.
It’s good that it worked out that way. From what I understand, a Jacektomy is not a very pleasant procedure (although I continue to believe that we would collectively benefit from doing it).
I’m 99.9999999999999% certain that “DavidK” is Jacek. But I will not hold it against him. If Jacek chooses to convey an amusing anecdote through his “DavidK” inflatable doll, so much the funnier for the rest of us. But I refuse to blamestorm and search for my own inner Jacek, and through my refusal I foil Jacek’s intentions.
(The funny thing is that I live in the same city as Jacek. I know who this person is in real life. I am currently in the same building as he! I could reveal many things about this strange person, but I will not, because by attacking the Jacek who happens to be the actual Jacek, I would merely feed my own inner, metaphorical Jacek.)
Well, chiming in to support yourself with a sock puppet might count as trolling by some definitions, but this instance is a pretty mild example (as is this). Anyway, it seems that Jacek mostly uses the Rickardson account for legitimate I6 discussion.