Can you still be a member or not?

E

exercise forever

Cathlete
Due to the disgusting post in the ask Cathe forum, are you allowed to still be a member? Just curious. Did not want to bring the subject back up.


kim
 
Based on experience I can tell you it's best to ignore what happened and move on or post your question in the ASK CATHE forum and maybe SNM will respond.

Just my $.02 :)
 
There are always sick people out there. I think when those disgusting posts take place of course the posts are removed and I suppose the users are banned, but I think people can still become new members of the forum. I wonder if SNM reports their IP addresses to authorities or if they track them down. Nobody in their right state of mind would post something like that in such a serious and classy forum. When I saw that user name last night I thought that maybe SNM can reprogram their database to allow only clean user names and also if they can check the content of databases for dirty words before the messages are posted. A lot of popular sites do that. Now that Cathe's becoming more popular the forums are more subtle to trolls.
 
>It's been deleted. You don't want to know what it said.

Hey, I'm nosy, and I've been out of town. Can someone pm me with the info? And what's with the username?
 
I have a message board for my students (I teach 7th and 8th graders). I have two students who help me out with making sure the board stays clean. I've had the board for 3 years and never had any problems until.... last year when a student became angry at another student who was on the board a lot. He decided to tell all of his older friends to spam the board with porn. Of course, this caused problems for me, not the student he was trying to hurt) Luckily, one of the students who is a moderator deleted it before too many people saw. Sure wasn't any fun writing an email to all the parents explaining the situation. I didn't get any complaints, prob. because I covered my butt with notifying them first.

You can set up message boards to block certain words, users, etc. However, on most boards, if you are banned you can sign up for a new user name and get back on. What I did was make my message board where all new users had to go through me to get signed up. Of course, this wouldn't be feasible for Cathe's forum.
 
I am wondering if that poster can actually be prosecuted if they can track him down. The post was not just leud, it was scary.
 
This is strictly for those of you who would like to know if anything can be done...

I work in the industry, and yes you can track down the poster if he is located in the US or Canada. All internet service providers (ISP's) have Acceptable Use Guidelines that all of their customers agree to before signing up. If you use AOL, SBC Global, Netzero - whoever - you have agreed to these terms when you signed up - you may not have read them, but you've agreed to them. They will be posted on their webside. Obviously, this poster would not meet those guidelines.

All IP's are distributed by ARIN (American Registry for Internet Numbers) who keeps a record of where each is sold. You can do an ARIN "Who Is" search on amy IP address (literally, that's what it's called), and find out who owns that IP (www.arin.org). Usually it's an ISP who is identified. You then have to go to the ISP and let them know of the infraction. Most ISPs would like to keep their records clean (the anti-spam people can literally block whole segments of the internet from people who don't keep their records clean - and that makes for unhappy ISP customers), so they will send a warning to the poster (they know who uses which addresses), or they can cut service if the infraction is serious enough. Usually they will give a warning for an instance like this. If the consumer gets too many warnings, they will cut the service.

I do not think you can really prosecute this guy based on one post. It's a shame, but the laws are not there yet.

Probably too much info, but I thought I'd let anyone who was curious, know.
 
I saw the post. It was lewd and crude but contained no curse words at all. I am not excusing the behavior but you are treading down a real gray area if you want to attempt to prosecute people for that. Cathe's team did the right thing by deleting it and moving on. A better job could be done however of banning certain non-curse words to make it more difficult to post something like that.
Also, IP addresses can easily be masked by a firewall to make someone invisible on the net. My firewall does just that.
 
There was nothing that could be prosecuted in that post. It was not discriminatory or threatening and potentially offensive speech is not prohibited by our laws.

Sounded to me like some idiot trying to be what he thought was "funny." There are truly people out there that have nothing better to do w/their time.

Christine
 
Believe me - there's always a trail. The IP comes not from your system but from your ISP and you have to go through your ISP to get anywhere on the internet. You can't mask it. But, as pointed out, there's not much that could be prosecuted.
 
It's also very hard to get the ISP to pull accounts, my BF hunts down hackers/spammers/crackers for a living, you have got to have a ton of evidence, and a whole lot of free time. As ISPs are slow, even if you work for the FBI. As they main question, are you sure that's the correct IP#? We'll get back to you and check our logs. Translates, in a couple weeks we'll write you and ask for some more information and if the user has did it again.

And anyone who has been around the net for a while, knows when you harass a board, to mock your IP#. There are a ton of programs out there today that do this, very well and then its a real pain to try and hunt them down, as when they go threw several proxy servers it's like chasing your tail. Well it's not our problem as once the user touches a proxy its proxy's responsibility. Proxy: We offer a free service; it is the ISP responsibility for they are providing them with access to the net.

And if they use a proxy from another country, your basically completely and totally out of luck to do anything.

Also a lot of times with boards you can't block IP#s because if it's dynamic every time you connect to the net, you are assigned a different IP#. So anytime they harass they just simply disconnect and reconnect and got a new IP#, and what's bad is say I block the old #, any poor soul who also has the same ISP, if they draw that IP#, they'll be blocked, as well. Static IP#s aren't so bad, as usually the ISP assigns the person that one #, and they have to actually call their ISP to get another #, if that one gets blocked, and you usually can't ask for many before the ISP won't give you any more.

So it’s more frustrating then anything, there have been a few court cases of harassment, but those are very few and far between as you have got to be more then just a forum or board operator to get logs from an ISP, showing where another user has went on the net.

Kit
 
I don't think there are grounds for prosecution either, but something has to be done when people do things like that. Maybe by filing a complaint we can unmask some sexual predator or someone that needs help. It could've been a teenager trying to be funny but it could've been some sicko like that man that killed the Groene family in Idaho. He certainly had an interesting blog. I've been a member of these forums since the late 90s and yes we've had some trolls but I've never seen a post like that in here. It was scary indeed.

And yes people use routers and other programs to change their IPs or make it invisible, but like it was said before there's always a trail. Those trails are the ones that the FBI and other federal agencies use to catch hackers.
 
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