7 Habits of Highly Defective Posters

... with apologies to Scott Adams and Stephen Covey.

Think of this as a course on how to bin friends and influence moderators. Feel free to add your own creative comments.

Tell me a story, Mommy!: "Honest, Officer, I wasn't even there. It was the guy next to me!"

Look, if you're going to lie, keep it simple and believable. Don't try to be clever. Every time you do that, you're repeating the same "creative story" some dozen or so other morons have told us before. You would be truly amazed at how often this stuff repeats. It's like a steady diet of bad burritos.

How exactly do people think it helps to have a moderator catch them in an outright fabrication? Maybe they should catalog their BS, so they don't contradict themselves every time they open their mouths...

Dear Liary, Today I told Paul that the fake screen shots I used as income proof in my WSO were the fault of the outsourcer that did my sales copy. I think he believed it. Maybe I can get him to JV with me!

That happened, by the way...

Yeah. Really.

Deep Post: Don't suck up to the moderators. It just makes us suspicious. We know what you're after, and we're just waiting for you to make your move so we can slap you stupider.

Play with Dolls: "Sock puppets, trolls and shills, Oh MY!" No, Dorothy, you're not in Kansas anymore, no matter what your IP address says.

Fake accounts created to shill products, avoid the consequences of abusive posting, or just argue without having to deal with the backlash that comes with being stoopid. Even with proxies, these people leave trails and evidence. Anyone who's clever enough to do this effectively isn't so clueless that they need to bother.

Interestingly, the worst of these have unconscious habits of word choice and typing patterns that are unique (and invisible) to them. They're like ID badges to the rest of the world, though. "Hey! Over here in the mask. It's me. I'm Jim!"

If they only had a brain...

Karma Chameleon: Also called "The Reincarnation of Peter Proud," this trick is as bad as the movie and the song. In the same soundtrack.

These are the single most inane group of the bunch. They get run off, and they come back with new names and identities, thinking they can start all over with whatever it was that got them nuked in the first place. And when you catch them, they act like their new profile and IP address are a "Get out of hell free" card or something.

Some people's kids, eh?

A ban isn't on your account. It's on you, personally. If it's permanent, that does not mean you get to pretend to be someone else and come back with a clean slate. I don't care if you call yourself Lazarus Long, Woodrow Wilson Smith, or H.R. Puffnstuff.

The Resurrection: Whenever I see this one, I hear a Randy Travis lyric run through my head... "Diggin' up bones, I'm diggin' up bones, Exhuming things that's better left alone."

This is mostly a trick of link-spammers. They seem to think that commenting on old posts is a good way to add their sig file links without being noticed. They don't understand that, the way vBulletin works, they're screaming "Smuck alert!" when the ancient thread shows up on the front page after a 3-year hiatus.

"Stupid, stupid rat creatures."

Mightus Wellby, MD (JD, PhD, DVM and DNRC): If you are not a doctor, lawyer or Indian Chief, don't play one on the Internet. It just causes problems for people who don't understand that people in regulated professions don't give professional advice in online forums.

This also includes forum lawyers, those annoying trolls who seem to think that moderators are constrained to a literal interpretation of what's written, only what's written, and how the trolls interpret what's written.

Sorry. Thanks for playing.

Oh, and that whole "First Amendment, free speech" thing? You may want to talk to someone who actually earned passing marks in 8th grade civics before you make a fool of yourself publicly. Or read it for yourself, paying special attention to the first 5 words... We ain't Congress, bay-bay. And online, that's just a local ordinance anyway.

Stealth Bummer: "Look, Ma. They like me. They really like me. I'm going to run a WSO!"

Yet another in the long series of boring re-runs churned out by people who think they're clever and original. You come up with a burner of a thread title, hint at wildly profitable new techniques, create discussion, and then...

How touching.

Look. I like good schlock as much as anyone. I'm a big fan of "Andromeda," "Batman" and "The Rocky Horror Picture Show," after all. But if you're going to do a bad copy of an outdated comedy, maybe it should be "Get Smart" instead of "Rank and Stinky?"

The Internet: 10 million channels, and nothing new to watch.


Paul