Originally Posted by vincewy

Like 2 Dodgers' fan attacking SF Giants' fans in the parking lot that led to brain damage? OK, that's an extreme example, but saying sports fans respect each other is quite delusional (perhaps in a fantasy world).

Originally Posted by LPDAL

The troll account problem is not paranoia.

Any time there is a controversial topic -- say, the recent hubris involving the major 3 United States-based majors and the Gulf carriers -- you'll notice that a ton of accounts that haven't been active for years start coming out of the shadows. One has changed his flag from U.S. Minor Outlying Islands to Lesotho to Estonia and is now trolling about on some of the Civil Aviation threads on which US domestic routes do and don't work. Sorry, but I doubt someone from Estonia cares so much about US domestic routes... And now there is this new troll account, Dubaiaman123 that starts a new thread every time one of the ME3 Carriers has a PR stunt with this current conflict going on at the moment -- his latest, one about Tim Clark "demanding an apology from US3" or some nonsense -- but never posting any replies of his own. He lights fires and watches them burn alive.

I feel bad for the people who respond to these troll accounts and then get in trouble--even prominent, mature users fall victim to them. They are instruments in removing members and it is very obvious as they often have a badly-shrouded writing style of another prominent and/or banned member. But it's not like I didn't do anything, in fact, I made a long list of potential troll accounts and emailed it to the moderators who then performed IP checks. While some, were, in fact banned, many remain and it is all too easy to use an IP anonymizer such as UltraSurf to get around a prior banning. I have stopped using the quote function completely on A.Net because some members will use it to get your posts deleted as posts that quote a post that is deleted must be deleted as well.

Thankfully, the Tech/Ops and Trip Reports forums are mature for the most part, and that is where I stay. For the jealous users who continue to post flamebait on even my most reports, there is the "Report Post" button, and I have to credit the mods as they are being very proactive in deleting those posts. Luckily, some of these repeat offenders have had so many posts reported by me that they no longer post flamebait on my reports anymore, great deterrent, IMO.

Sorry to rant,

-LPDAL