Opinion of PFAdmin

[PFAdmin]

Seems like a cool guy, FF. It's a pity he resorted to mass-banning, but that was his call to make, and I can see his reasons even if I disagree with them.

We definitely had mixed feelings about that, but from our position, we didn't know exactly what we were up against. What we knew was that we had in the neighborhood of 70 accounts that had been set up specifically for the purpose of trolling one of our new members. As far as we knew, there may have been even more.

The "Battle Plan" thread made it clear that some sort of mass effort to disrupt our board was underway, and we assumed that additional, more detailed planning information was being exchanged through PMs as well. We didn't know how bad it was going to be, but we did know that it had the potential to become a very serious disruption to our board, and we don 't really have the staff to deal with that at the moment - one of our admins, and perhaps our most respected and beloved longterm staff member, died a couple of weeks ago, and it really left a big hole in the staff structure for the time being. We felt we had to nip it in the bud.

I did try to create an account yesterday morning to come here and ask the members to please just leave us alone, but apparently screwed up my e-mail address and didn't get the confirmation e-mail in time. By the time my account was approved, things were already starting to snowball, and we decided to just go ahead and shut it down. I won't say we didn't have mixed feelings about it - if my account had been approved earlier, I was hoping to not just get you to call off the attack, but hopefully even get some of you to join; many of you are exactly the kind of members we need more of - but at the moment the decision needed to be made, that seemed like the most prudent one.

Sorry it came to that; I wish we could have found another way. Maybe I should have created an account here earlier, and tried to head it off before it reachd that point. I dunno. A lot of things seem more clear in hindsight. We just didn't see a better choice at that particular point in time.

[PFAdmin]

Seems pretty cool, though the bottlecap story was a bit weird.

Actually, I felt like an idiot after I posted it, because i realized I misremembered it and got it mixed up with something that happened in  a bar once. If I'd remembered it correctly, it would have probably sounded even more weird. It wasn't bottle caps, it was one of those chinese yo-yos, with the coiled up paper that you can flick out about 3 feet and by the time someone turns around, it's already colied back up again. Turns out you can get pretty accurate with those, with a little practice.

And the funnier part is that the guy's partner, the cop who let me go, said, "Look. You seem like a nice guy, but it's only 7 o'clock and you've already had a lot to drink. If you keep this up, this night isn't going to end well for you." Or words to that effect. About 3 hours later, that same cop was helping carry me up a flight of stairs to an ambulance because I'd fallen down the stairs and twisted my knee. "You!" he said. "I told you!" Wasn't my fault they didn't have guardrails on all their stairways.

[PFAdmin]

PFAdmin, just out of curiosity, how did you find us? Did you backtrace the red = Democrat and blue = Republican maps?

I don't want to give too much away on a publicly searchable board, but most of it was basic detective work. we have some staff members who are specifically charged with reviewing and approving new accounts, and they see so many of them, it's amazing even to me how quickly and easily they spot so many anomalies in an individual's registration information, or commonalities among several registrations that come through in a short period of time. We've got two who are almost psychic, and a third, newer one who is learning fast.

And when you have something like 50-70 accounts all in a short period of time, it becomes much easier. With that many accounts all showing up at once, you're inevitably going to have tons of overlaps. That's a hell of a lot of blips on the radar screen all at once.

That's the basic outline of how we did it; there were actually a few more tricks that confirmed it, but I really would prefer not to disclose those. Sorry to be uncooperative, but someday when you're on our staff, we'll teach you everything!

[PFAdmin]

There are close to 20 that we're not absolutely certain of, so we left them alone. But I think the total body count was just an inch or two north of 50. That was why I probably sounded so steamed; it took a bit of scrutiny!

[PFAdmin]

Yeah... I wonder if that was smart. I don't want to wear out my welcome around here; I like y'all, but I know I'm already not that popular with everyone. Might not be the best idea to hang around, but hell, everyone else has a state, and I felt badly not seeing Wisconsin anywhere. I'm proud to come from a place with such a strong tradition of progressive populism... even if that tradition is becoming more historical than contemporary.