Posted Notice: No Bloc Here

'Bloc Party en barcelona' from flickr user alterna2.

I like it because it's a Bloc of like two people.

Background: Dennis P. McCann accused some users of bloc reporting here. Calvin pledged to get to the bottom of it here. I understand why, because while users accuse each other of all sorts of nefarious secret misdeeds in my inbox, it doesn't happen much in public, and it's certainly not something that should become the norm. This case may well discourage that practice, because it's pretty much empty.

DPM sent me a list of users he thought were engaging in bloc reporting and collusion; some, he claimed, were reregisters of previously banned users.

The list included: Krishna-167929 Worldknightboy aRTieA kpr37 Consultant13 Judge-574295 B.S. Detector And the private groups: Heart of Darkness Heart of Even More Darkness Illuminati Vine Jewish anti-Defamation League La Plume de ma Tante Men in Black NV Bilderberg Group Zionists

It took a lot of digging, and some tool-building, but there wasn't any bloc reporting going on in any of the groups. Many of the users are friends and vote for each other/defend the same positions. [Which is fine.] As far as the reregistering theory, Consultant13 was a rereg of previously banned user Bartleby, apparently notorious before my time, but who I had banned for constantly trolling as Dev Null-652335. [If I did that in your column, let me know, I couldn't dig it up with Ivy Search, so maybe it's been deleted.] They're banned.

DPM also sent me some screenshots showing visits to a collapsed article in his column from a different website and from the private groups. But nothing untoward happened.

I apologize that it's taken so long, and if I do a better, more consistent job, I get back to Mars faster and that article maybe doesn't happen. But in the future if or when someone's calling out other users/groups for behind-closed-doors wrongdoing, I should be able to answer the accusation much faster.

An aside about rereg theory: If someone who was banned comes back and follows the rules of the site and never gets reported, I don't see any scenario where I'd 'catch' them. And I'm at peace with that. Of course, many. many users who get banned come right back and do the same thing. That said, Repeater Infringer Policy's in place, and no matter how reformed/productive you've become, I've gotta enforce it.

The whole 'publicly posting who-called-out-who' thing feels odd, but I it makes sense. I think that if Viners are taking it there and alluding to or accusing other folks of outright malicious behavior like bloc flagging, then sometimes it'll make sense for me/admin to step in and say 'here's the deal' and then we can go back to debating tea ads or whatever.

I'll try my hardest to get back to everybody, even if it's just a sentence, when you report your well-founded suspicions to me. Of course, there's more than enough blatant violations going on, and after all the research I've done lately I want to beseech you to have faith in your fellow Viners to not conspire against you.

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