= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Will_Newsome comments on Consider giving an explanation for your deletion this time around. "Harry Yudkowsky and the Methods of Postrationality: Chapter One: Em Dashes Colons and Ellipses, Littérateurs Go Wild" - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
Comments (204)
Is it not possible for an administrator to log on as a particular user?
Because if it is, the mechanism to stop further downvoting, stop further posting, and reverse unwanted downvotes is to
1) have administrator log on as Nier 2) administrator then changes password of account to something Nier doesn't know 3) administrator then goes to list of comments of mass-downvote victims and undownvotes all the comments
That would be insane.
Is it not possible for an administrator to reset a user's password? Would that be insane? If not, what happens when somebody forgets their password, is the account just dead in the water?
Because if it is possible for an administrator to reset a password, then it is possible for an administrator to log on to a particular account.
Yes, it's technically possible, but actually doing it would be a rather severe breach of privacy...
SO we can state that we do not have the technology to stop a banned user from downvoting posts, and we don't have the technology to reverse banned downvotes.
But we do actually have the technology, it is just considered a "severe breach of privacy" to employ it?
And so we have to pretend that accomplishing the identical result by some hacky code into the database to get the same effect on the database is any more or less a breach of privacy, even though it is (potentially) bit-wise identical to just using the simple technology of logging on as the user who's account needsd adjusting, and changing the banned user's password so he can't use the account he is banned from?
Is this some wierd signalling thing, where the appearance that something is really something else is more important than the actuality of it?
It's a Schelling point. If you can log on as a user you can do a lot of nasty things and we would rather that admins not do those other things.
Does it seem irrational to anyone else here to say
"We don't know how to prevent this person from using his account to post new downvotes and we don't know how to reverse the downvotes already posted"
when the actual situation is
"We could stop this account from posting new downvotes with 5 minutes of admin-effort and we could reverse the effects of the mass-downvoting with about an hour of admin-effort without having to write a line of new code, but we won't."
I think so, yeah. I don't know whether it's reasonable or not but that's what it is. I might be wrong.