I don't really want to reopen merlyn's discussion of posts being moderated based on who posted them rather than their merits, but I've noticed what appears to be the sort of "snipering" that occurs on Slashdot happening here.

For those of you unfamiliar, "snipering" occurs when someone on Slashdot gets moderator points, and uses them to go back and moderate down long-forgotten posts of people they don't like -- causing the poster to experience an unexpected drop in karma. Unlike here, there is a finite window: once a discussion is archived, no further moderation can occur (and even before that, the posts fall off the "radar screen" of the poster).

Here, OTOH, a person can go back through all of their old posts from their homenode. If you're an infrequent poster such as myself, theoretically ancient posts are still on the first page. That's how I noticed that someone was going back and downvoting posts I'd made (including one where I was asking a not-particularly-stupid-or-offtopic question) nine months ago. Again, I'd like to think those discussions were long since dead -- which leads me to believe that the mods were done with malicious intent.

Not that it really matters to me all that much: it's reputation points on a bulletin board, after all. I'm not losing money, cheese, or backrubs as a result, but still it ires me that someone would be doing it, especially to a member of the community with as relatively low-profile as I tend to maintain.

Spud Zeppelin * spud@spudzeppelin.com

In reply to Are We Coming to This? by spudzeppelin

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.