From Meta:
It seems the primitives have discovered a way to immunize controversial threads they may start. What they can do is to "self-alert" on their own thread, or get a sock or a friend to alert on their thread, and give a ridiculous reason for the alert. The jurors then dismiss the stupid reason and vote to "Leave It", and the thread is now free from others who might alert for what they would consider to be legitimate reasons (IOW, no two alerts on the same comment).
In a Meta discussion of that topic, I find this:
yardwork
Preventing alerts on ourselves wouldn't help much. Posters would just get their socks to alert.
Or their buddies.
A more effective approach would be to encourage all DUers to base their jury decisions on the merits of the post, not the alert. In other words, if there is reason to hide the post, hide the post even if the alert is lame. We shouldn't need a prosecuting attorney to explain to us why posts should be hidden. Every DUer could familiarize themselves with both the Community Standards and the Terms of Service before voting on a jury. If they don't want to bother with that, it's very easy to opt out of jury service.
Warren Stupidity
So I was wondering how many socks are operational.
I think I now know the answer, quite a few posters here are using socks. In particular my guess is that the cave dwellers and their ilk do a lot of system gaming here.
obamanut2012
We are akways seeing a say, 50-post poster
Who joined in 2005 or something. What else could those posters be?
Warren Stupidity
Exactly.
DURHAM D
I have also noticed that when a few of the long time problem posters are banned another "long time" but low count poster pops up with the same views.
Watch out, steven the lesser has commanded you peons not to mention us.
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