Making the Chess.com Forums Better

Quoting for posterity.  Always hilarous when a sockpuppet outs themselves...

I like how Itude, the paying member and probably head of the hydra, identifies as British, but chooses American for his more abrasive sockpuppet.

Mitchitude?

Well,Rjc we finally found the real Musacha- ha ha ha ha

ho ho ho harde har har har har...................

I don't know, but I just got a message from him that vanished when I tried to click on it.

I think maybe Mitch was just having a little fun at RonaldJosephCote's expense.

RonalJosephCote, who see's John Musacha sockpuppets everywhere, and Mitch who is the only person here who knows with 100% certainty which accounts actually are.

+1 agreed.

sheesh...

I recommend therapy.

Maybe that is therapy for him, and a lot of fun! ha ha

I recommend that all of the posters go back and reread Eric's opening comment statement to this thread. There are indeed some most interesting and intelligent people that belong to the Chess.com community. Kudos for the vast majority of our chess family.

          gg;  did you just get moderated??   I had a comment about your behind and Itude's dentures.

No, I have seen this happen a dozen times since the mid 90s...somebody is using a sockpuppet and claiming they are separate entities, then in a long thread with a ton of account swaps they finally swap accounts one time too often and accidently post on the wrong account.  Same parameters, same progression, same results.

This is usually followed by overly nonchalant denials, more revelations, and finally the dreaded "my little brother logged onto my account" defense... ;)

               Did you here the rumor??  I heard it from Katie, and Mitch. The person who is the 1000th poster on Erik's thread, gets to be a free moderator for a day. Were almost there, 943

I hope it's you RonaldJosephCote as you deserve this great honor! Yet deserve it fellow Chess.com family member.

              I know how this ends.  We get to 999, and Erik chimes in and says, Thank You Very Much, Have A Nice Day, Godnight!   We have to block Erik, on his own thread.          Don't tell mom.

There's nothing to fear from sockpuppets.  As I said earlier in this thread, the chess.com sockpuppet problem is like dealing with a bunch of gnats.  Who cares enough to distinguish one individual gnat from another?  They have no significance except in numbers.  

That's the difference between an RJC and I...I don't give rat's behind about "Johnny" or variant definitions for trolls, etc.  New trolls and sockpuppets here are obvious from the first handful of posts/replies.  There's no point in trying to identify them beyond generic traits that give them away quickly.  

Just deal with the content.  Someone posts another "Magnus Carlsen: modeling God?" thread?  Ban the account and tag the IP...rinse and repeat.  Eventually you will get a pretty short list of class C IP addresses where all your sockpuppets hail from and then you can start narrowing things down; write up the evidence, and contact the service provider that holds that IP ranges and complain.

If they are using an anonymizer/proxy service, contact them...most legitimate providers will not accept abuse on their service.  If the provider doesn't care, contact chess.com's bandwidth provider and ask them to blacklist the anonymizer's server IPs...the anonymizer service will care when that happens ;).  This is how Email spammers are dealt with, and the same method works for messageboard spammers.

Of course, it would be easier to just implement some form of restricted posting for new accounts...

You are entirely too paranoid RonaldJosephCote! Eric would never do something like blocking his own thread!

            btickler;  "that's the difference between RJC and I".   NO, the difference is, you know your stuff.           Where were you 900 posts ago??  Ideas and suggestions to make the forums a better place.

I certainly wasn't with chess_gg! Wisdom will certainly come out of this thread by Eric!

Thanks, but Erik is not ready to go those lengths yet, or it would have happened by now ;)...

It won't be dealt with until it affects chess.com's bottom line; either through massive decline in forum usage on chess.com and a general reputation among chess players online as a site with mostly junk on it, or through hiring of additional headcount purely to moderate trolls and sockpuppets...and since Erik is going the volunteer mod route, it's going to take months or years before it becomes clear that volunteer mods won't work long term.  Probably when a troll manages to become a mod and causes havoc and public controversy ;)...unpaid "staff" can't be held accountable, after all.

I've been through all this before when I was helping Netcom/MindSpring/Earthlink grow from 250,000 subscribers to 5 million subscribers.  Homegrown web services are nimble and grow like wildfire, but they tend to evolve in the exact same pathways because they have never scaled up before, are shortstaffed and in a constant state of reactive firefighting.