I’ve gotten
“Sorry, there was a problem with your last request!”
When attempting to access two threads in this forum. Both showing S-Bahn as the last poster to the threads.
They wouldn’t, by any chance, have been the GE/Alstom merger and the trip from Ithaca to Lincoln in 1960, would they?
Both of those, as of about 8:00am Central time on Wednesday, had the passive-aggressive ‘disappearing displayed content’ problem on my system – you can now open the posts, but they only show ads, no content below the title. You may remember this happened before, and we never got an explanation – and I expect none now, either.
It remains to be seen if S-Bahn Raymond has been mandatorily moderated or banned.
It’s situation normal for Kalmbach IT 
(Thanks, CO and Steve Sweeney!)
No - it was the following threads
[b]Found this little treasure of a book " New Jersey Place Names" made by WPA in 1930s
Bridge Line DH historical society?[/b]
Both of those show ‘blank’ too when I check them. I can understand the one about place names – it never developed the railroad context I was thinking it might – but I thought the D&H organization was a fair question to ask here.
And the ‘Test Post’ thread has railroad affinity?
That may be why they did that … something was broken
I’m seeing the “Sorry…” message as well. If S-Bahn was Raymond, he seemed a bit more “with it” than normal.
I suspect S-Bahn was banned for abuse. He started a thread a couple of days ago that had nothing to do with railroads, but was just abusive and insulting.
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Clearly flagged - IN CAPITALS - as a “Test”.
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Made by a Kalmbach employee, as a test of their forum.
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Containing no insults or other material or approaches banned by Kalmbach TOS.
Keep in mind we “can” post civil threads that are OT if we clearly flag them as such; the point Kalmbach makes is that since this is a ‘railroad’ board, not a social-media site, so there shouldn’t be frequent and regular posts that are not related to railroad issues. I am on record as disagreeing with the ‘Ben Hom’ style of moderation that instantly deletes posts not strictly ‘on topic’ for a board or forum, and bans users that dare transgress or question the policy. But I can’t have much sympathy for attempts at trolling, threads that veer into ‘forbidden territory’ as given in the TOS, or obvious ad hominems, amusing as exchanges containing them can become at times.
I also respect the approach to moderation sometimes taken here, where only the ‘egregious’ posts are removed from a thread, and clear and fair warnings are given to ‘transgressors’ (I resisted calling them Trainsgressors, and will continue to do so… oops, looks like I did)
But trainsgressing keeps it on topic [swg]
Banned but not to the point of Anonymous…profile can still be accessed…
Most discussion forum software bans posters by IP vs mail address since the mail address can be more easily spoofed. The inherent problem you have with banning is it hits prospective clients as well because your banning the IP address by last IP used to access the website vs individual specific IP address. So the more bans you introduce the narrower the audience to your website becomes over time. Hence bans cannot be permanent and over a period of so many years you have to purge the IP address table used for banning people and then they are able to log in again. Most by that time are long gone and never try but some do and this explains how you see every once in a while a previously banned poster return again with a new userid. So to my knowledge there is no such thing really as a permanent ban. Additionally, this is the reason Mods (at least the smarter ones that know what is going on technically) are very reluctant to ban people. It is kind of a hari-kari move to their own marketability of the website. If Kalmbach had to repeatedly ban a lot of people from the discussion forums they would just drop the discussion forums vs risk their advertising revenue.
Additionally, Trains.com website is load balanced over several public presentation servers or instances. The servers or instances are rendered to you in a round robbin methodology as you login. So you might be accessing trains dot come via presentation server A and I might be doing so via presentation server B. And that is why you see “intermittent” problems. Server A might have an issue but only X amount of people encounter it because its presentation is not rendered to everyone it is done randomly by round robbin approach based on the time you login. Server
I suspect a moderator(s) finally realized that S-Bahn was actually the latest handle for Raymond, so acted accordingly even though he didn’t seem to be misbehaving.
In other words, you won’t discuss your post? As you won’t respond to anyone who knit picks, perhaps purl stitches are fair game? [}:)]
CMStPnP’s explanation makes a fair amount of sense, and as he said there are a fair number of details that he glossed over to avoid causing massive amounts of “MEGO” in the readers.
An example is the problem of banning by IP address. It should be relatively simple to ban access by IP address, but would only be effective if the person that would be banned only accessed the website from a single fixed (static) routable IP address. (Routable means a publically accessable IP address, e.g. 8.8.8.8 for Google’s DNS servers) as opposed to a private IP address such as 192.168.1.1 (default gateway IP address for most consumer routers). In reality there are two problems with banning a IP address: the first being that the person to be banned could be logging into the website from multiple IP addresses either from having a dynamic address assignment or from logging in from multiple locations (e.g. different libraries); the second as CMStPnP mentioned, other users may be using the same IP addresses as the troublemaker.
I can also relate to the issue with a flaky server in a load balancing group. Back in the dial-up days, the access “number” would connect to the next available modem out of a pool of modems. In my CompuServe days, there were a couple of flaky modems at the local access number, as soon as I saw a string of characters that looked like a random merge of awk scripts, perl scripts and sendmail configuration files, I would hang up and dial again. Usually got a good connection the second try. Never did see anything looking like APL…
BTW, it is ‘purl’ when referring to knitting, ‘pearl’ when referring to clutching…
Bans at Kalmbach are tied to the login credentials; when you enter a username and password corresponding to a banned account, the system goes straight to the “banned” page. It does not care what IP credentials you provide – which, for a system that does its access security entirely with username and password, is eminently sensible even to Government programmers…[}:)][:)]
Point taken! I stand corrected. Perhaps he prefers the popcorn stitch?