Delete Threads Made By Ban Evaders / Burner Accounts

[Skroe]

The mods of this forum have made abundantly clear that, despite widespread demand for it from their user base, that their prefered approach to dealing with ban evaders and burner accounts is to just use the report button. More comprehensive types bans and participation requirements (like the 100 post minimum limit for OT idea) have been entirely ignored. Fine... whatever.

But what about actually cleaning up the mess the burner accounts and ban evaders make?

Here's what happens, and why ban evaders with their molotov cocktail threads keep happening: a burner account makes a thread, the burner account gets reported, after some period of time, the burner account gets banned.

But the thread almost always stays open and visible. Thus allowing the conversation - almost always initiated for less-than-honorable reasons - to continue, and sometimes take on a further life of their own.

Why would ban evaders and burner accounts ever be disincentivized in such an environment? They accomplish their task. They can just do it all over again.

This gets down to what the nature of a 'ban' is. Taken at face value, it means form mods are putting you on time out, which means no participation of any sort. And with that, what is the nature of the prohibition on alternate accounts in general? Because moderation wants one name associated to one posting history.

With all of this in mind, the current approach makes no sense. It's in fact, entirely counter productive.

This is my suggestion: when someone reports a ban evader or burner account that start a new thread, and that account gets banned, the thread gets nuked too, just as if it is CAPTCHA-beating bot spam. Not just locked (though even that would be an improvement). Deleted. Poof. A ban, is a ban, is a ban. What's the purpose of a ban if the burner accounts gets banned but the firstorm they unleashed carries forward? You might as well unban their main account at that point.

[Endus]

Generally, they do try and do this, the problem is that if they don't catch it early, the evade can often get deeply involved into discussions and then it's not just a matter of purging their posts/threads, but posts of anyone responding to them, which doesn't always mean a convenient quote box to locate such. And if you don't purge those responses, you end up with disjointed threads with partial discussions and responses to posts that don't exist, which is chaos.

I'd agree the issue is getting worse and there needs to be a fix put in place somehow, I'm just pointing out it's not as simple as just deleting their content. Which is already standard practice, if caught early enough.

And frankly, getting into a thread and derailing it and getting it locked or deleted is often their goal, so helping them achieve that isn't a fix either.

[Tziva]

We already do if they are caught quick enough for the reasons you stated.

However, if it's not caught early, we're not going to delete threads with dozens (or hundreds) of posts that other people have been actively participating in. That's not fair to all those people to have their posts suddenly disappear and in some cases the discussion happening within those threads is fine even if the OP is not.