Don't make eye contact

[Zero]

Was Kurt Vonnegut aware of "the poster who cannot be spoken of"?

 

[EvrClrx311]

Seems you've omitted a key element of the story...Did you cough up the fiver??

sorry, I figured it was obvious... no

 

[ronin]

My wife and I were panhandled by a Gypsy lady (is Roma the PC term?) with a baby in a train station in Rome. We both thought that the baby was a fake. I also was willing to consider that the arm cradling the baby might have been fake too, so the real arm was under the shawl, free to dip into our pockets.

While I don't like being rude or obnoxious (no, really!), we finally found the best way of dealing with them was to quasi-yell at them to get away.

 

[TromboneAl]

Several years ago, I was sitting out in front of a hamburger joint on Whittier Blvd. waiting for my lunch order. A fellow came up and sat down next to me. He was not an unfamiliar sight along that stretch of highway; walking up and down the road, or stretched out sleeping on the sidewalk, everyday in a dirty trench coat, long matted hair and the Charlie Manson look in his eyes.

He launched into a convoluted diatribe about land bridges between continents and the movement of ancient peoples, dinosaurs and all manner of strange goings on in the universe. Finally he looked me in the eyes and said, "Do you understand?"

I replied, perhaps more harshly than was warranted, that I didn't have a (expletive deleted)ing clue what he was talking about.

Well, I thought I'd expressed it clearly.

 

[Nords]

As well as my new book the "The Dummies Guide to H*Mania"
To help promote my book I will be giving away some prizes.
First prize is "A day with H*"
Second prize is "A weekend with H*"
And the boobie prize is "A week with H* and JWR too"

Another forum poster might be willing to license his copy of H*Mania Buzzword Bingo for an appendix... or perhaps on the website!

If someone becomes unpopular because of abnoxious postings, he or she can come back using a different username, correct ? Maybe h---s has already come back under a different name....

He has a very distinctive writing style (verbose is kind) but not particularly obnoxious more like a pit bull. There are at least two dozen veteran poster who could catch a doppleganger of him after a handful of posts.

Nope. We mod folks check for that. It happens, but rarely. Old Hoc couldn't probably stand to post under an alias, though, because he is a one-note drum.

We've had a few posters try that. They can lurk all they want, but the vast majority can't hide their vocabulary or their speech patterns. I can think of four offhand, although I'm not going to mention their names here because I've already received hate mail for doing so in the past.

Of course there may be a poster or two who has successfully masqueraded here under a new identity. We wouldn't know, because we wouldn't detect their successful subterfuge. But if their masquerade/subterfuge is so successful then they're essentially a new poster, which means that their old poster behavior is gone, and so the behavioral problem is gone too. Although knowing some of these guys, keeping up the masquerade must be quite the torture and not worth the effort.

vBulletin has a tool that compares poster IP addresses. If you're going to try to create multiple identities, then you're going to have to do it under multiple IPAs too.