Gosh.

Deena said: "Using March as an example, Trudy has a lot of social capital with me, March has none. Finding out that March was Trudy after the fact bothered me since I had built up some negative feeling for creepy-stalker-March-person" - I think this is a very salient point, because afaik provoking negative feelings was the antithesis of what Trudy was going for at the time. Having only read the The Universe posts, and missed all the MARCH stuff, I was a bit puzzled about who The Universe was, since I was all Out Of The Loopy wrt new posters & wasn't sure if someone was having a joke or if it was a new bod. But knowing that it was Trudy, and hearing about the MARCH thing, puts an entirely different spin on it. I now see it more in the light of using the fake html coding - an elegant and witty way of using the medium. Albeit one that pings some people in a manner very much not that which was intended.

I do get why this has pinged people badly in and of itself, with the not-knowing-who's-talking thing. Especially since it evidently made people feel excluded (and I think that's something geeky fan-types are especially prone to, maybe, with a higher than average number of fannish types having been left out of the joke by cliquey types in high school?).

The issue of a poster genuinely trying to pass themselves off as somebody else in order to deceive the community is a different, if related, issue, imho. Very much so. And the issue of Famous Fans, or people who've had an unfortunate collision of online and real world identities and need to put on a quick mask so that their RL friends won't be able to identify them any more (and we all jump up yelling 'I'm Spartacus! It was I who wrote the Gay Vampire Snuff Porn, not the kindergarten teacher! They're not the real Spartacus! Look! Salad shooters! And monkeys! With pants!").

Clovis isn't a sock puppet. I've met Clovis. I've subscribed to his journal. t /not at home to Mr Logic

I didn't know about the Ferrets, but I'm utterly charmed by the notion. I remember somebody writing a post ages ago and they mistyped something about their shirt controlling them, and then clearly realised what they'd done, and then the whole post shifted into the Voice Of The Shirt. Was that Victor? Gud? Damned if I can remember, but it had me in tears of laughter. And I kind of see these cited instances of Sock Puppetry in the same light.

fwiw, as a horrifyingly infrequent visitor to these pages, I'm very much down with the notion of revealing the sock's sooper seekrit identity in their user profile as a simple way of ensuring that one doesn't have a sense of exclusion/inability to guage intent and context when engaging with an unexpectedly masked person. Seems fair enough to me.

Also? There are a lot of people here whom I want to hug. At the risk of being a bit of a drip. It makes me sad that this has grated on people on both sides like this.

ND -- can you imagine if this had anything to do with actual rights? I don't understand people who do this for real, with heavy consequences on the line, and like it.

Yeah, just a bit crazy in that case.

In one of my professional organizations I'm getting ready to step up to one of the bigger leadership roles and it's going to involve the major planning and direction each year for the conferences and such. It's an organization that has been taken over by tenured academics in the past 20 or so years, and my section of it is trying to turn things around, in part, by putting someone like me, a working professional, right in the middle of the red tape. That outta be fun.

my section of it is trying to turn things around, in part, by putting someone like me, a working professional, right in the middle of the red tape. That outta be fun.

No more Vice for you, little Mister!

I was really surprised today when I saw all the posts in B'cracy and Lighbulb and found out it was about the Universe and March.

Yesterday when Universe posted it took me about a minute to realize someone was being playful and it wasn't a lurker concidentally de lurking at that time. Same for March.

But then I've never had a problem with any of the playful puppets. I'm honestly baffled that people are hurt by this kind of thing. I understand the feeling that a playful puppet like this is done with some kind of malicious intent or to make fools of anyone who doesn't guess who the person behind the puppet is.

I was mainly observing, in an attempted humorous way, that we are all seeing first hand how big organizations end up with layer upon layer of red tape. I think if there was a good solution then we'd see fewer organizations with that amount of red tape.

I am pretty sure your brain would've exploded if you had been active during the original voting discussion. As it turns out, the first layer of red tape is the hardest.

I'm trying not to get all worked up here, but I really do genuinely believe that process and procedures help things work better. And just like everything else here, people can opt in or out of any level of participation they want to.

Man, I just wish everyone had taken Bureacracy and Democracy with me in college.

big fan of having stated policies and procedures. Bigger fan of people actually knowing and following them.

It's not at all that I'm against policies and procedures. I help plenty of organizations work them out and put them in place. I work with a number or arts organizations on budgeting seasons and how to run acting companies, etc. etc. It's always a delicate balance between the procedures and policies that will get you there and going too far.

Bigger fan of people actually knowing and following them.

This is the trick, it has to be simple enough that you can know and follow them. Take the tax code in the U.S. for example. That has now grown so complicated that you need a hired professional to even begin to understand them.

As a side note. I am compiling info on all the votes taken - FYI

the first three votes all had to deal with the voting procedure (to have voting, what constitutes a majority, the discussion thread- bringing something to a vote - voter turnout).

the fourth was about re-opening discussions, how long we should wait before allowing a new vote.

the fifth was about taking action against unacceptable behavior.

the sixth was about having restricted areas for registered users only.

the seventh was grandfathering in all decisions before voting.

the 8th, 10th, 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th, & 17th were about adding threads (Minear, housecleaning, politics, unaired wonderfalls, bookclub, tv thread/housecleaning/Lost, combining Buffy & Angel)

the 9th and 16th were concerning spoilers and spoiler policy wrt to threads.

This is the 18th item that has been proposed and then discussed since 2/2003.

I'm trying not to get all worked up here, but I really do genuinely believe that process and procedures help things work better.

Me too. I don't think this board would have survived without them. It was a fuck of a lot of hard work to put them in place, but they do what they're supposed to do. I like consensus too, for that matter.