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So, just to clarify, the difference between being banned (for being ACAKAK) and not being banned (for being ACAKAK) is now reliant on "phrasing", as interpreted by Tom, Ganesh and Haus?
As far as I understand it, E. Randy's analysis is right. Anyone can draw Tom's attention to somebody they think might be one of the people who have been banned from Barbelith, and Tom then looks at the IP address, login, that sort of thing.
And no, Flybs, it is not on the grounds of "phrasing". I'd be perfectly happy to explain the grounds. On the other hand, I'm slightly concerned that, if the intention is to make it easy to cause endless arguments about whether or not somebody is a recurring troll, providing a list of handy things to avoid doing might be a poor start.
What I can say, very simply, is that Tom had some time ago identified the modus operandi of this particular user, which was to find old suits with Hotmail addresses displayed which had not been used for a long time, and to see if this Hotmail address was still in use. If it was not still in use, he would then sign up to Hotmail using that email address. He would then request a password reminder from Barbelith, and use that to log in to the suit and use it. Therefore, if a suit was registered in 2001 and had a Hotmail account on display, had not been used for some time and suddenly started posting a lot, that greatly increased the likelihood that this method, which has been used as far as we know pretty much exclusively by ACAKAK (like that). Tom identified this method some time ago, and posted about it in the Policy.
Therefore, once I asked myself the question, the first thing I did was check TW's profile, to find that the suit had been registered in 2001 and had a Hotmail address on public display. I then performed a google search to see when it had last been used. It turned out to have been fallow for quite some time. Also, the previous owner had been so obliging to sign his posts - who says that it's useless? - which allowed me to find out that the previous owner of the suit was Varis, whom I remembered as having quite a different style from the current incarnation. People do of course change over time, but the difference between Varis' style and the style of the current "Tits Win" seemed to support the idea that the suit had been taken over.
That's all pretty generic. I could go on to detail why I thought that the specific new occupier was the particular user it was, but I'd rather do that by PM, if that's OK. "Phrasing" was one of those, although I didn't use the scarequotes when I appplied it.
Hawksmoor, on the other hand, has different phrasing, or if you'd prefer "phrasing". He also joined the board in 2004, significantly later than the common run of taken-over suits. I don't know offhand whether he had a visible Hotmail address before Tom hid them all. His interaction with the board overlaps Tits Win's, which is not the normal M.O. Again, there are a number of reasons why I do not think Hawksmoor is ACAKAK, which I would again be happy to share, but a lot of that will depend on how much faith you place in phrasing and how much in subject matter, where there are significant overlaps. Lots of young people with very limited reading habits, however, share some or all of those interests - sexy ladies, violence, violence done by and to sexy ladies - and similar ways of reacting. Hawksmoor's responses, while certainly vitriolic, are far closer to those of Crimes of Fashion than ACAKAK.
If he's to be banned, the strong argument is because he is posting and PMing homophobic abuse. The weak argument, in my humble and at present, is that he's a knodgesuit. I may be wrong about this, of course. |
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