I recently saw that you got banned from lobste.rs for being a sockpuppet from jart and just now i realized that you are an actual, different person.
[unconstructive complaint about lobste.rs moderation skipped]
I hope HN treats you better.
[unconstructive complaint about lobste.rs moderation skipped]
I hope HN treats you better.
Lobsters has had serious problems with users who try to exploit the site for self-promotion, and it's more serious for us than HN when a few votes is enough to move something to our homepage. As part of addressing it, we have a bright-line rule prohibiting new users from submitting stories from new, unseen domains in their first 70 days on the site.
Five hours after jart invited woodrush, at 2022-01-12 02:26, they tried to violate the rule and got this error message:
> woodrush.github.io is an unseen domain from a new user. We restrict this to discourage self-promotion and give you time to learn about topicality. Skirting this with a URL shortener or tweet or something will probably earn a ban.
At 2022-01-12 02:40, jart submitted the exact same link to break the restriction, and woodrush submitted several posts from that domain. After that, jart started submitting stories from all of her invitees to circumvent this rule, which anyone can verify by comparing timestamps on her submitted stories at https://lobste.rs/newest/jart to creation dates for her invitees at https://lobste.rs/u#jart.
On top of repeatedly breaking a rule that has a big red background and explicitly warns of a ban, two of jart's invitees were manually warned and banned for other inappropriate self-promotion. Finally, when another of her invitees started obvious sockpuppeting, I looked at the invite tree, saw this pattern of abuse, and cleaned up after it.
To rebut another claim repeated a couple times elsewhere in the comment tree, all banned users get an email notifying them of a ban with the Reply-To header set to my email: https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/blob/master/app/mailers... None of the users banned in this action have clicked reply to explain how I've made a mistake enforcing an unambiguous rule of ours.
Nobody said they were sockpuppets. Only you are saying that in an attempt to create a strawman and mislead unsuspecting readers. We are not idiots.
The two accounts that were banned for sock-puppeteering were 'i2' and 'thatworkshop'. And you have conveniently omitted these two accounts from your comment. What do you have to say about them? You invited them. And they were sock-puppetting? How do you explain that?
After seeing such wilful blatant misrepresentation, forgive me if I'm having difficulty just taking your word for it.
https://valleywag.gawker.com/why-does-google-employ-a-pro-sl... https://www.dailydot.com/debug/occupy-wall-street-supports-g...
I must say, I respect her a good deal less than I used to.
How can I be legitimately banned for spamming when I made zero comments or posts? I rarely post or comment, so did not get a chance, but I was glad to join the community.
I've done moderating work when phpbb forums had their heydey. The clever sockpuppet accounts or voting rings don't start posting about the projects of their main account right from the first day. The clever ones remain dormant, mostly idle, participating in other discussions. They look just like normal accounts.
But much much later when the main account posts a "show project" post, the sockpuppets or voting rings add +1 or post a few words of praise and then move on to commenting on +1-ing other posts.
And voting rings become more difficult to detect when they don't post anything related, post unrelated stuff but quietly upvote the main account's posts/comments.
Sock puppet is only one possibility. Other possibility is legit accounts forming a voting ring. You and me cant see voting actions. Mods can.
The mods have access to server access logs. Mods can see who +1-ed whose posts/comments. So if you need evidence for sock-puppetry or voting-ringery, try asking the mods about it. We can only speculate here. I'm only describing what I've found in the wild from my days of moderating (small) forums.
I mean to say that only because you can't see the other accounts posting related posts/comments does not make them any more likely or any less likely to be sockpuppet or voting ring. They may be legit. But they could be a ring. Or they may be legit. Only the mods with the access logs can tell.
IIRC over the last year, I've only commented once on lobste.rs, when it came to something about Python's import system, and only upvoted my own blog posts about Cosmopolitan Libc and related comments + maybe one or two other posts. I disagree with the ban, but I can see why my account would get banned as a spammer (one of the accounts banned alongside mine had a double account I think).
lobste.rs is a wonderful community, and I'm happy to see that someone there atleast mentioned this blog post. Hopefully I can get un-banned at some point.
Luckily I can still comment on HN though!