After falsely accusing me of threatening to shoot people, creating fake accounts to mock me, and posting dick pics of Russian schoolboys with my contact info (a situation so vile that I couldn’t write about it in the blog at the time), the trolls pulled a power play that I haven’t seen happen on Slashdot in 15+ years. During the long Labor Day weekend, the mods (moderators) systematically down voted every comment I had to -1 to drag my karma from excellent (50 comments per day) to terrible (two comments per day). So I pulled a power play of my own: I asked management to delete my ten-year-old account.
The DMCA
The deletion of my “creimer” account became inevitable when I used the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown notice to have management delete the “cdreimer” account, and subsequently four other fake accounts, that the trolls created to mock me since Anonymous Cowards (ACs) can only post ten comments per day per IP address. (Creating a new user account requires a unique email address, which is easier to do than finding a network with a different IP.) As a content creator who routinely asserted his rights under the DMCA (usually against idiots who reposted free copies of my ebooks on international websites), I made quite a few enemies by using the DMCA on Slashdot.
When the trolls started posting dick picks of Russian schoolboys with my contact info on Russian image websites, I had to issue, somewhat ironically, hundreds of DMCA takedown notices to have the images removed. Using Google Chrome to translate Russian into English on the web page (a feature that the trolls didn’t know about), I’ve noticed most image websites had a drop item on their contact form called “DMCA Notice” to expedite such requests.
The trolls howled bloody murder for six weeks because:
- I was issuing DMCA takedown notices for dick pics that I didn’t own the copyrights.
- The foreign image websites honored the takedown notices at face value even though I wasn’t the copyright owner and the DMCA was unenforceable in their jurisdiction.
- The dick pics came down faster than the trolls could repost them.
At the end of the day, the Russians didn’t want those dick pics on their image websites.
The Author Account
I took possession of the “cdreimer” account by signing up the newly available username to claim as my own. (As for the other user accounts, I’ve signed them up with disposable email addresses from Guerrilla Mail and discarded the password reset emails to render unusable.) I’ve never wanted “cdreimer” (first and middle initials, last name) on Slashdot since I created the “creimer” (first initial, last name) account years before I started writing and publishing under my author name. While the trolls think that both names represent the same person, the personas for each one are quite different.
- As the trolls found out the hard way, “creimer” was an Internet brawler willing to get down and dirty in a protracted fight. About 8,000 comments — probably more since the comment history before 2009 is no longer available — were written before 2017. As the trolls escalated the conflict, an additional 4,000 comments got written this year.
- As for “cdreimer,” he’s too busy to post more than one or two comments per day, doesn’t care to argue, and has no use for the trolls.
During the last three months of “creimer,” I’ve carefully built up the karma for “cdreimer” by submitting news stories for consideration. It took ten approved submissions to move the karma from neutral to excellent. Of course, this was all for naught.
Getting Modded Down
Since “creimer” was consistently up voted more times than down voted by the mods, the modding system didn’t matter. Threats to mod my account into oblivion rang hollow for most of the year. After the DMCA episode, it wasn’t unusual for an AC to post a comment and a down vote at the same time. (Although ACs post comments anonymously, many have user accounts to gain mod points for the purpose of punishing logged in users.) When the day of reckoning came, I was ready to react.
Management deleted the “creimer” account without any questions the day after Labor Day.
Like the “cdreimer” account, I signed up the newly available username to prevent someone else from reusing it to mock me. Like the other user accounts, I used a disposable email address and discarded the password reset email. Unless I make a request to management to delete the current incarnation, “creimer” was gone for good.
Two weeks later I started posting comments as “cdreimer” and behaving like a noob (new user). The honeymoon didn’t last long. The trolls started shit posting and the mods started down voting every comment I wrote. In short order, my karma was terrible at -1 and I could only post two comments per day. That’s fine with me. The last six months of playing with the trolls on Slashdot has been an educational experience.
Meanwhile, the trolls are getting desperate. They keep posting the same copy-and-paste comments in response to the one or two comments I’m able to post each day. If anyone disagrees with them, they accuse that AC or user as being “creimer” and copy-and-paste the same comments in response. I don’t even bother to read these comments, being the same drivel posted for months. Most readers find this “following around” comment behavior more annoying than posting links to dick pics.
When Slashdot had a two-day outage from flaming power supplies at their data center last week, I made a comment over at SoylentNews (a Slashdot-clone that came into existence when the code behind Slashdot was open source for a while). Like a pack of Chihuahuas in heat, my trolls came running over to hump legs and tried to get the mods there to mod me into oblivion. It didn’t work. Unlike the mods at Slashdot, the mods at SoylentNews up voted my comment twice for its content and didn’t down vote because someone got their covfefe hurt.