'On the internet no one knows....'

'On the internet no one knows....' Posted by BC Cog on 2009-August-25 17:08:42, Tuesday In reply to Who's Running Boychat? posted by Enochian Have you considered a reason you might not know who is running BoyChat? People who run BoyChat have a big target on their back, and likely their front as well. That's why many, if not most have decided to go to a cog nick instead of their own nick or a recognizable variation of it. It's out of respect for the "mods, cogs and admins" that BC's unofficial Official Privacy Promoter neither confirms or denies being among their ranks. The linked post is in a conversation talking about cogs taking attitudes or being unnecessarily short with the "customers." In that same thread Maintenance Elf talks about people he knows from "right here on BoyChat" who were harmed by vigilantes due to not being careful enough with their identity. Cogs try to keep their official communications as dry and professional as possible because they don't want their personality to bleed through, but with certain types of trolls just dryly stating the rules doesn't help. Trolls who stay within the rules as they harass and bother people trying to have honest conversations are hard to deal with. Sometimes we need a troll wrangler to taunt the trolls so that they drop the typical sealion "just asking bro" and show themselves to be petty manipulative crazy... well internet trolls. Everyone runs into them eventually and it is important to learn how to recognize them and talk about them with key words such as "sealioning" which are patterns that trolls tend to fall into in many other areas of life. But troll wrangling is dirty business. Trolls are persistent and crafty in the way that they bait people into saying more about themselves than they would like to. If a cog/admin/mod were to troll wrangle they would have to take great pains to disguise their regular speaking voice, because trolls so often sealion and quibble over every damn thing in their attempt to bait their victims into talking more than they'd like about certain topics that have absolutely nothing to do with the topics that we came here to discuss. Maybe they would only speak in the third person and refer to themselves as "BC's unofficial Official..." as a way to never say their own name, reminding themselves never to share personal details. Maybe they would make a game out of how much they could discuss here without sharing one shred of personal information about themselves. Maybe they'd usually let it slide when people misgender or make other assumptions about their personal life, just to seed the control freaks #DOSSIERS with misinformation. Those are just some ways that an admin/mod/cog might try to obscure their speech patterns enough so that they could retain their anonymity while using a troll's demands for personal information as an example to remind all of their fellow cogs/mods/admins how hard it is to talk about the important issues that we face as a community without being baited into long pattern forming conversations that could end up nick linking themselves to their non-admin/cog/mod nicknames.