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Welcome, new trolls! We're pleased as punch to have you aboard, unfortunately as you may have noticed our moderators are unable to give you the moderations you've been working so hard for. Since we can't really do much about people not moderating more, we're going to be giving out more points so that the ones that do can give you the attention you so desperately crave.
Moderators: Starting a little after midnight UTC tonight, everyone will be getting ten points a day instead of five. The threshold for a mod-bomb, however, is going to remain at five. This change is not so you can pursue an agenda against registered users more effectively but so we can collectively handle the rather large uptick in anonymous trolling recently while still being able to have points remaining for upmodding quality comments. This is not an invitation to go wild downmodding; it's helping you to be able to stick to the "concentrate more on upmodding than downmodding" bit of the guidelines.
Also, this is not a heavily thought-out or permanent change. It is a quick, dirty adjustment that will be reviewed, tweaked, and likely changed before year's end. Questions? Comments?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Saturday August 26 2017, @06:38AM (5 children)
The problem is that that leaves more of an evidence trail than the current approach. Under current system, via a proxy, I can post anonymously in a way that is very hard to trace to me either my account or my IP address. With the submit anonymously option, the server would be able to link poster to account much more easily. You can still get around that with dummy accounts, but it's not lightweight.
A possible alternative here is to create a temporary AC account for each anonymous post (say AC#@story id). So for this story (SID 21277), we might have AC1@21277, AC2@21277, etc (and just hide the "@" part to get AC1, AC2, etc). The poster can choose to keep a cookie around so that they can continue to post under the same AC account.
For me, the real problem of AC posting is that I don't know who is who. Get three or four AC postings in a row and its hopeless. You'll never be able to piece together the chain of discussion as an outsider, sometimes not even if you're one of the ACs involved. But if I can see that there's an AC1, AC2, and AC5 posting in the thread, then we can maintain some sense of continuity and coherence.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 26 2017, @08:04AM
What?? You want me to keep a cookie for each of my AC sockpuppets who reply to each other??!
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday August 26 2017, @03:27PM (3 children)
I made a similar suggestion. But above, maxwell demon points out why that is not an acceptable alternative to true anonymity -- unless it's new for every story, in which case it might work, provided no one else happens to use that computer that day, nor has access to its logs. Scratch that...
Idea: let the AC decide if they want to be known as AC1, AC2, etc. for a given story's discussion. That would require adding an alternative to the "Post Anonymously" -- "Post as numbered AC".
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday August 26 2017, @04:59PM (2 children)
That's what I was thinking - new for every story. As to the last stuff, I consider it the responsibility of the user to practice basic hygiene. A machine like that would be easy to compromise with keyloggers or worse.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday August 26 2017, @05:35PM (1 child)
The biggest anonymity problem is likely people posting from work, using an employer's machine. Yeah, it could still be traced (keyloggers and such, as you say) but at least having true anonymity shields them from casual reprisals.
Too bad there isn't a popup manager for temporary cookies, maybe something portable that sits outside the browser. Of course that doesn't do you any good in a locked down environment (if you're not locked down, why not just use a portable browser or even a whole OS on a USB stick?)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 26 2017, @11:30PM
Also, some folks here have their own trolls and getting rid of or curtailing the AC option would make them have to choose whether to put up with the trolling or go elsewhere. In some cases that might not be such a bad thing, but people with their own trolls aren't always the folks we want to be getting rid of. Those are often times the folks that are stirring the pot and spurring interesting debate rather than spewing out the usual talking points.