Atheists go to Heaven too

[Angrboda]

The reason the rule about socks exists is because it's dishonest and deceitful.

Fortunately for you and other theists, being deceitful and dishonest is not against the rules.

My experience in moderating is in interactive chat services, not forums, but I rather imagine that the concerns are similar. I could give a flying fuck whether someone is being dishonest or not. What I do care about is whether what someone is doing is disruptive of the normal activities in my channel, or otherwise threatening the goals that myself and other moderators and participants have. And if someone is disrupting things in a novel way that nobody has foreseen, I'll not hesitate to ban them, whether or not there are or are not guidelines in place (there are none in the medium that I moderate; it's solely at the discretion of the moderator).

This brings me to the no sock rule. I was active for a couple of years on a forum that had no policy against people creating sock puppets. Nobody cared, as the presence of socks there does not in any significant way disrupt activities. I have three accounts there, two of which I've posted a substantial number of posts under. People know the two accounts are mine, but they do not care; nor would they even if they didn't know. The most prominent concerns that I see with sock accounts are ban evasion, spamming, and ganging up on members or using them as shills. Since spamming is already against the rules, and disallowing banned members from rejoining could be handled by a rule explicitly against that, that leaves other rationales for the no sock rule. If a person is not using them to gain an unfair advantage over someone else, I'm not sure I see them as that problematic. Sock or not, it's just another voice, to be dealt with as just another voice would be dealt with. Now GC is all "I knew it all along" and shit. If BWS hadn't come forward, he'd have had to slug it out with this "newcomer" just like he would anyone else. (I haven't seen the actual discussion, so insert the appropriate qualifiers.) If BWS wasn't using the sock in a disruptive or patently unfair way, what's the beef?