[OT] Ty Tower needs to go.

[Janice Caron]

On 06/03/2008, Lionello Lunesu <lionello at lunesu.remove.com> wrote:
> > I don't think anyone is suggesting moderating /this/ forum.
>
> Oops, that's what I've understood..

At the start of this thread, Jarrett Billingsley asked the question:
"Is there anything that can be done /short of making the boards
moderated?/" (My emphasis). So Jarrett was asking how this forum could
be made less trolly /without/ making it moderated.

Sadly, I suspect the answer is nothing. Banning an individual won't
help, because individuals are identified solely by the "From" field in
an email header, which is easily faked. Thus, a banned individual
could just invent a new identity and carry on, and an innocent
individual could be impersonated and banned unjustly.

Other forums deal with these problems in different ways, but the most
common is to require posters to register using username/password
credentials. This doesn't stop anyone from assuming a new identity
every time they get banned, but it does prevent impersonation. I don't
think that would work here though: There is no practical way (that I
know of) to strengthen poster credentials on a newsgroup.