That's a fair question.
First of all, it's because you cant stop people from creating new accounts. If someone wants to create a new TMF account, or facebook account, or twitter account, they're going to. That's not something that can be controlled by me or any administrator, even of a billion-dollar company.
So in some cases, it's like - "I could kill this account, but how does that change things? The same person will just do the same thing again." Shutting down an account is not, by itself, a particularly effective action to take.
Also, its only obvious in retrospect, in the sense that there are a lot of posts that are in the "might be a sock-puppet" category. I see a lot of members who initially make me suspicious for one reason or another. Sometimes just the timing of their joining the forum will raise my radar because it coincides with something I've done behind the scenes.
I once banned someone from the chatroom for being a catifish, based on not just my observations but also some behind the scenes things that I was able to see. And it turned out to be wrong. There were some coincidences that made it "obvious" and yet it wasn't the case.
And when you're in the position where making that determination has consequences, it's not the same as just being an outside observer who sees a problem and wishes something would be done about it. Once I take an action, it's extremely hard to undo it. In the above case, the woman I banned was PISSED, and had every right to be. We could have lost a valuable member of the community over that mistake.
And there have been other situations like that, where what I thought was obviously going on turned out to not be the case. So I've learned to be careful, methodical, and comprehensive.
With Vivan Love specifically, it was so obviously fake that I just didn't take it seriously at first. I figured nobody cared about the fact that it was obviously a fake persona as long as it was giving them what they wanted.
But even with that being said, your impression that nothing was happening until the moment when they got shut down is not really accurate. There was a lot of behind the scenes detective work and discussion going on. There's more to it than just "kill or don't kill the account."
Once I get to that point, I have to figure out what's going on so I don't make the problem worse. If I had just shut down Didates as soon as I sniffed out a problem, I would not have also been able to shut down their other accounts and give the community a complete picture of what had been going on. And I would not have been able to put myself in a position where I would be able to keep an eye on that person in the future if they attempt to return.
And in some cases, I just don't know because I have thousands of people to keep track of. I wasn't aware that Didates even existed until this latest incident.
This is a big forum, and there's no road map for how to handle things in a way that won't inadvertently make things worse.
For example, you brought up P&R - I agree that there was that problem, but just killing sock puppets wasn't a solution, because if you think we didn't do that you're mistaken. People just create more of the same, and then I have to chase them around like children. And because we're dealing with a troll instead of a reasonable person, it becomes a game to them - "how much trouble can I cause before I get caught this time?"
We tried a dozen different ways to deal with that situation. You may recall the revolving door of policies on the P&R forum as we tried tuning it and adjusting it. And we considered at least a dozen more where we'd say "What if we do this? What if we do that? How will that play out in the long run?"
I was looking for a permanent and least-disruptive solution. And I found one, that not only made that specific situation better, but also solved other problems with the P&R forum, like its effect on the tone of the forum in general.
TL;DR - we do ban sock puppets; sometimes they come back; sometimes banning them isn't a big enough solution.
It was clear that didates26 was a sock puppet account of someone, it just wasn't clear who it was.
It was clear that Vivian Love was a sock puppet account of someone, it just wasn't clear who it was.
So...in that thought process, why were they allowed to do the things they were for as long as they did? Vivian Love spent MONTHS doing their act, with multiple posters even pointing out clearly that the poster was playing a bit, that they were being inflammatory for no good reason. Yet nothing happened. There isn't even an argument to be made about it being a witch hunt. Hell, when P&R was still accessible to anyone on this site, trolly sock puppets flowed like water down a stream to attempt to share their regressive politics and argue with others. That finally got fixed...with a solution a lot of people demanded for over HALF A DECADE being implemented.
What was gained by letting these morons skip about sprinkling shit crusties all over and stinking the joint up for so long?
