Stop spoofing comments

July 12, 2002 7:53 AM

Speaking of integrity, maybe it's time to reconsider this?
posted by crunchland to Feature Requests at 7:53 AM (17 comments total)

There's a subtle difference in the 'posted by' lines in the spoofed ones: the text is white instead of light grey. I'm assuming Matt has tweaked the style sheets a little.

Still caught me out, though.
posted by rory at 8:01 AM on July 12, 2002

I fail to see the offense, crunchland. Rory wasn't pretending to be someone else (which most people agreed, in that last-linked thread was unacceptable and deceitful) - he was merely using humorous nicknames, clearly presented as such and arousing no possible confusion between identities.
posted by MiguelCardoso at 8:17 AM on July 12, 2002

As long as it is done in jest, and no one gets unruly, I don't see the harm.
posted by adampsyche at 8:20 AM on July 12, 2002

Yeah, Matt fixed it so you can't spoof properly (from what he said); I instantly identified the comments you cite as fake.
posted by Marquis at 8:20 AM on July 12, 2002

Pt the once, Miguel, in response to being thoroughly perplexed by Pracowity's foolery. What I meant above was 'Pracowity still caught me out [with his initial trick]', not 'Crunchland caught me out [it's a fair cop, guv]'.

Click on 'Anonymous Poster' in that thread and see whose user page comes up... (Huh? Matt's allowing user pages to redirect to other user pages? Whuh.... *bing!*). And Crunchland's links are to Pracowity and Frasermoo, not to Insane Wibbling Marshmallow me.
posted by rory at 8:28 AM on July 12, 2002

(How the hell did 'I only did it the once' turn into 'Pt the once' just then? Ptupid puters. Ptime to go home.)
posted by rory at 8:32 AM on July 12, 2002

I thought it was pure genius, and all those involved masters of their art.
posted by Frasermoo at 8:37 AM on July 12, 2002

The fake post trick was really clever the first 100 times it was done.
posted by rcade at 9:26 AM on July 12, 2002

There's no difference that I can see with the fake posts, using Opera 6.0 and Mozilla 1.0 on Linux. The "posted by" text is the same color.
posted by jaden at 5:50 PM on July 12, 2002

For me in IE/mozila on windows and mac, there is a slight difference.

I could ban the phrase "posted by" from submissions. That might knock it out forever.

posted by mathowie (staff) at 6:15 PM on July 12, 2002

Hmm. Seems to me that could lead to problems. I'm thinking of people posting things like 'I don't know if this was already posted by someone else, but there's a great website with tons of information about this (news story/band/movie/meme/whatever) right here...'

Maybe it would be safer to ban posts with timestamps? '6:15 PST' and the like. Though I don't know how feasible it would be to implement such a thing.
posted by toddshot at 6:37 PM on July 12, 2002

I could ban the phrase "posted by" from submissions. That might knock it out forever.

Seconded. One way to fix it without a ban on the words would be to always change "posted by" in messages to "<span class="copy">posted by</span>".
posted by rcade at 6:47 PM on July 12, 2002

I could ban the phrase "posted by" from submissions.

There was a previous comment somewhere about using a special character to denote the start of the posted by line, and banning that character from submissions. I think that might be better, if you're going that way, since there are also legitimate uses of "posted by" (as pointed out by toddshot), but far fewer legitimate uses of that character.
posted by walrus at 2:33 AM on July 13, 2002

Isn't this an awful lot of fuss about something that has been completely harmless so far?
posted by timeistight at 8:21 AM on July 13, 2002

timeistight, you've just uncovered our dirty secret.

MetaTalk: An Awful Lot of Fuss About Completely Harmless Things.
posted by rory at 8:57 AM on July 13, 2002

Amen.
posted by y2karl at 9:38 AM on July 13, 2002

What fuss? I just asked if maybe it was time to reconsider it. If it's harmless, then it's harmless.
posted by crunchland at 9:52 AM on July 13, 2002