Well, I don’t know about you other forum member’s but a guy by the name of Phunk You,Good Morning Looser’s, and many other names, has been dirtying up the forums. I guess this guy is close to being stopped. If you or anone else has problems with this guy, please hit the “Report Abuse” button. Grandpaw Pettibone’s order’s on the Flat Wheele Cafe. He is known for sending dirty private messages, and posting other really bad stuff on other threads. He apperantly normally posts with our good friends over at the Model Railroader site. So let’s all band together and help the TRAINS.com staff, to get this guy off the forum!
Justin, you should know that a regular posting on these sites will not allow you to disguise your identity, and the word is spelled “anonymous.”
But I do agree with you – in the past 24 hours I’ve gotten the finger from a cartoon and (even worse) from a cartoon of Jesus. So the thing to do is complain. I did, and it worked.
Mr. Smalling! That’s why I underlined anonymous! That’s ok though[:)]. I know, but that’s what screen names are for. (Course, mine isn’t exactaly seecrative.) I got the same 2. I’m sick of this guy. We will together obliterate him! Mwahaahah! I did report abuse like you told me to in our E-mail conversations.
Just hit the “Report Abuse” button and let the moderators take care of the problem. Monday A.M. many of the message threads had a cartoon character flipping the bird. I reported it and within 30 minutes they were all gone, and the user has hopefully been banned.
Unfortunately, anyone can join, create a phony user name, and get immediate access to post their childish remarks. This happens every year as soon as the schools let out and the kiddies are getting bored.
Hi al! Thanks for replying! I did send a report abuse message, and if I see him again, you can bet that I will do it again! Yall’ do the same thing too now. Keep posting so he can relise that we mean buisness.
And defanatelly. Thanks to the modarators who are working this issue!
Regretfully, I saw one of these posts and did not report it (in the interest of free speech). I am a moderator on another forum, and if I had seen such a post there I would have deleted it. In the future, I will report immediately anything I find to be unnecessarily offensive.
Many thanks to the moderators–I hope my posts are not making your jobs too difficult. They seem to generate some interest here, and I try to mention Trains and these fora elsewhere.
Thanks for your kind support and encouragement, Fellas. It turns out that the Reports forum was soon flooded (and I do mean flooded) with complaints and requests to have the offending material deleted. It seems we have feast or famine with this cretin.
Even though it was a dreadful weekend in some respects, due to the good works of this fellow, I feel that the great benefit is that now the staff at Kalmbach are more acutely aware of how serious and onerous this person’s behaviour is on their forum. My hope is that they will take concrete steps to change the registration procedure for new members. My suggestion all along has been that new registrants should not be able to post until their application has been vetted by a mod or admin status person, or that their first five or six posts must be scrutinized and approved before they are seen by the membership. This is routine on many other forums.
At one time, you were required to be a subscriber to be able to register to post to these forums. Has that changed? Perhaps this person is so intent on doing his thing that he is willing to invest in a subscription for each screen name? I find that a little hard to believe.
Morning all! I haven’t checked my e-mail so I don’t know if this creepy crank has been obliterated. I hope he has. People like that are not welcome on this forum. Thank you to all the moderaters who work hard to keep the forums clean, and safe![^]
^^^ What he said. If so, the perpetrator ought to be traceable. If not, why not ? And maybe it ought to go back to that - either Trains or another rail-related Kalmbach publication or book, video, etc., for this and other good and sufficient reasons. Such as: “OK, then why should I subscribe, if I can just come on here without a subscription ?” Not that I would, but I’m just saying . . .
But back to the main point here: Add my thanks to the moderators as well.
Also, I’ve recommended that these incidents be reported to both the FBI and FCC. No harm in upping the stakes here to some real serious stuff for that - “thing” - and letting “it” know that playing with fire can get “it” burned too . . . .
The forums are free to all who wish to register. All that is kept exclusive to those who subscribe to the parent magazines in each case is the stuff advertised as such. But, for posting on the forums, all ya gotta do is input your email address and pick a user name. This person does it with a malevolent intent, and if he can do it, so can others. And there are others.
Then I recommend that Kalmbach add a requirement that all users registering must include a valid phone number and street address*, and that same be verified to some degree before allowing them access to the Forums. Anyone who can’t do that for some reason or who has exceptional circumstances - such as being in the military, etc. - can explain that, and then we’ll leave it up to the sound discretion of the moderators as to whether or not to permit access.
(* Bluntly put - an address that would be sufficient for a sheriff to serve a citation, summons, or complaint in an injunction suit to restrain such actions, etc.)
This is a privately-owned, privately-run Forum. As such, the traditional U.S. 1st Amendment “Free Speech” concerns about a potential “chilling effect” on robust debate of requiring such disclosures - note that the disclosures would be only to Kalmbach and the moderators, not to the Forum members at large - is simply inapplicable. That doctrine is designed to promote political speech in public fora, not discussions about trains and railroads on a private forum.
I’m not particularly concerned about the risk of losing the participation of jerks like that, and I think almost all of the other participants here - even those who prefer to post under a screen name only - would accept such a registration requirement in return for less risk of this recent kind of nonsense. While some may see this as trading freedom for security, I don’t see the loss of freedom as being involved here. Instead, those who are posting ought to be willing and able to accept responsibility and to be held accountable for what they post. But others may have contrary views on that, of course.
This was proof of the classic observation (first noted by the Greeks) that it takes original thought to create, but any nitwit can destroy.
I know that this one hit a nerve, for those who follow a religion and for those who don’t. For anything similar in the future, report abuse, and DON"T comment on the forum…
You mean expanding those to even the people who aren’t subscribers? My address (not sure about phone number though) is already linked to my account via my Model Railroader and TRAINS subscriptions.
I agree. It would hopefully scare away most prospective “Trolls” since they would no longer be anonymous. That said, our current troll has several times linked himself to his YouTube account where his full address is visible… So I guess this one at least doesn’t care if we know who he is!
There was “talk” on an angry thread over on MR a year back about paying an unfriendly visit to this person at his posted address on youtube. He had a good chuckle when he replied…do you really think that’s my address?
Simplest approach would be to deny posting privileges until the registration is “approved”. It would mean a simple view and click for the mods for 99%, but we would immediately spot the bad eggs.
In time…I can only hope.
As I said to my mod partners off line, we owe this person a debt of gratitude. His exceedingly offensive posture this weekend has done us all a favour and awakened in us a desire to preserve this forum for its intended use, and not his. It has galvanized quite a few to take notice and to take offense. That can’t be a bad thing.
I am happy the moderators were able to clean this up and thank them. Having encountered a situation on another site I believe the computer address can be traced through, in this case Kalmabch’s, server for to prevent a recurrence or for prosecuetion of any kind should it be warrented or elected.
The only residual problem I am having is that I am not receiving updates on the postings to which I emailed customer service earlier.
Henry, this fellow is adept with computers. He uses several changing IP’s with the result that there is only an approximation of his location or ISP suggested. In his case, he uses hotmail or yahoo as his providers, but must use a new registration there in order to register here. We are but volunteers who get to this site several times each day with large spans in between. I can’t see a stack of new registrants, only the most recent that everyone sees at the bottom of the index page. If he slips through as Eat Poo, and some other legitimate new user registers within seconds, that person’s name supplants his and I would never know it…he is gone and in with the sheep (sorry, but you know what I mean).
When we ban someone, as infrequent as it is, that IP address is done for good. But if buddy picks the new Eat Poo name and registers with yahoo, yahoo’s system assigns him a new address that our system doesn’t know…so it says, “Welcome newbie!” and probably attaches a smiley to boot.
Additionally, we are pretty certain he “banks” user names. He’ll spend 10 minutes one night getting new yahoo or hotmail email addresses, and then use them to register with several names here, which he will record for future pleasure.
A small mind he is in a small world.
We need to do better at our own game than he. I am sure Dana, Wade, and team are working on a fix as we speak.