People got upset the poll didn’t go the way they wanted and still cry about it to this day. its pretty hilarious
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On a similar note: can we talk about how much of a problem the heckler’s veto is proving to be?
they specifically stated that the results of that poll would be used to determine the mount. what did they state this poll would be used for?
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It’s just a pity that making the issue visible and letting the powers that be know that people are still invested in wanting it to happen isn’t allowed to continue like High Elf threads and Worgen Tails threads, even though it would arguably do much better things for the community at large.
All because a handful of people are allowed to shut down discussion by blazing in to pitch a temper tantrum fit or shoveling out lies and misinformation under the mask of “I’m just asking questions 
” so that they can keep recreationally trolling on alts, objectively doing harm to people and making the forums a negative experience for everyone, without consequences to the reputation of their characters that their friends, family, guilds and associates know.
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For one, because it has been stated by Blues that the moderators have problems tracing patterns in activity back to a singular person for the purposes of applying penalties to forum trolls, because each character you post with is an island in terms of the data. That leads to situations where, like with the T-squad, people repeatedly roll up level 10 characters or Classic alts, start posting with them, delete the character, and while the forum moderators whack-a-mole with their individual post it’s seldom identified as a consistent pattern by a single person.
For two, because if there was a singular posting identity on the forums, you could ignore someone and all of their alts with a single request. Repeat-offender trolls would get frustrated when their posts started getting less traction because people would have already identified that they weren’t posting their genuine thoughts and opinions and pre-emptively ignored them, and gave others a heads-up that the person was a known troll.
For three, because right now each account gets up to about 160 likes and 160 flags on the forums, one for each character. With that, a single person can hide the posts of someone they want to silence by repeatedly reporting it for moderation, and with that they can create the appearance of a consensus, like people switching alts to vote on polls making those polls pretty useless for being a genuine gauge of the popularity of an idea or opinion. When the T-squad was around, they were consistently upvoting their own posts to make their ideas look popular and encouraging an environment where people who didn’t agree with the opinions that they pretended to have felt persecuted and overwhelmed, and flagging people who tried to identify their behavior to others. They played these forums like a fiddle for like a year, causing massive damage to people’s opinions of the groups that they pretended to be a part of.
For four, because it would have a chilling effect on some of the worst of people’s behavior if they do actually play the game and have friends, GMs, family, etc. who wouldn’t approve of their trolling habits and the opinions that they express disconnected from the characters that they know. If they were to switch to a Classic alt just to be like, “Oh yeah, well, women should be in the kitchen anyway, make me a sandwich!” they might end up having their GM, their friends, or their wife raising eyebrows about that. Future GMs, future friends, and future wives could also see that behavior and label it as the behavior of a person that they don’t want to associate with.
A lot goes on on these forums that isn’t necessarily actionable in terms of getting a person’s post deleted and actioned, but is still a trollish, negative, unsavory opinion to express. People are free to express their opinions, they’re even free to pretend to express inflammatory opinions for the sake of being disruptive, mean and negative as long as they’re not breaking the rules of the forum, but they shouldn’t be free of any kind of social consequences for that behavior by tossing a smokebomb and putting on a fake mustache and a top hat to pretend to be someone else.
I personally don’t have a problem with a “singular ID” being some kind of forum identifier instead of a person’s Btag, I just don’t see the point when there’s literally nothing nefarious that you can do with a Btag that you can’t already do better by knowing a person’s character-server. If people want to be super paranoid about it and make Blizzard reinvent a function that’s already built in to the forums, it’s whatevs to me, but at the same time a lot of people claim to have problems with the privacy of their Btag and will make up a million wild stories about what can be done with them when really they just don’t want any kind of accountability for the things that they post to be tied back to them.
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Please list examples of this so called “objective harm” because there is no possible way anyone could harm you on an internet forum. And don’t say words are violence or some equally ridiculous notion.
Here’s how it went.
The T-squad rolls up and goes, “I’m a member of this group, and I want this objectively ridiculous thing to happen in the game that aligns with my supposed identity!”
There is understandable backlash to what they wanted being unnecessary and ridiculous. The T-squad alt starts lashing out at people, like, “If you don’t want us and all the people in the group that I belong to to have this thing, you’re a bigot and terrible!” That caused an even harder backlash.
And they were pervasive. There were multiple threads like that up at a time, all day, every day. People would try to flag them for trolling and the posts would be restored with flag protection because the moderators were afraid of the appearance of silencing what might have been the genuine opinions of members of those groups.
But they weren’t genuine opinions. They were posted for the sake of being inflammatory, to give people who hated those groups a platform to be able to safely come in and say “I hate the things that you people say, you’re shoving your nonsense down our throats, it’s in our faces all day every day, and look at how objectively dumb the things you want are”. None of which was against the forum rules as long as they weren’t using slurs or hateful language.
Members of those groups started pleading with the T-squad to stop. They didn’t, of course, because the T-squad’s entire purpose was to make them look bad, like they wanted wild concessions and talked about nothing but their identities and were constantly on the attack. There are people to this day who are under the impression that the T-squad posts were genuine expressions of the things that the groups that they cosplayed as for the sake of making them look unreasonable were genuine. And because it was a handful of people repeatedly rolling up and deleting low-level alts it took a long, LONG time for the forum mods to finally identify what they were doing as a consistent pattern of behavior and shut it down. Even now, it surges up again every once in a while, once their bans wear off.
For the T-squad, it was hilarious I’m sure. They found a cheat code for trolling on the forums that the mods couldn’t and wouldn’t do anything about. In the meantime, the people who actually did belong to the groups that they pretended to be a part of still get backlash from people over their behavior. Every time you see someone pop off about how you people are shoving this in our face, I always have to hear about this here, why can’t you people just be happy with what you have and go away, the chances are that that knee-jerk negative reaction was made worse by being exposed to the T-squad antics, and people like theirs.
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Nothing you’ve described is harm and I don’t know what a T Squad is.
I already knew you weren’t interested in being convinced. That up there was more information for other people who might actually want information.
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Well you’d probably do a better job by actually explaining how anyone was harmed.
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I’m gonna refer you to your scrolling finger to mosey up a couple posts where I did, thoroughly.
Mmmmmmmmyep. That tracks.
Like I said, the things I said weren’t for your sake. You’re clearly not interested in a genuine discussion, just slinging catchphrases and insults.
I genuinely hope that you have a wonderful day, wherever it takes you next 
I really wish Blizz would give us a better forum. Battle Tags for this forum would help alot.
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Sorry, I don’t put effort into genuinely debating people who don’t read any of what I said and take less than a minute to not address any individual point that I brought up. I’m not interested in a catchphrase contest masquerading as a discussion. So I’m just gonna refer you back to:
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My day would be substantially more wonderful if you actually could show how anything in that novel you wrote was harmful.
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False. If people spam on character swaps they get banned for spamming.
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The key thing to remember is that the forum software treats each alt that you have as its own account.
So someone posts something trollish or spammy on one alt. The forum moderators look at that character’s posting history, did they do anything like that before? No? Okay, delete the thread as a warning but apply no penalty.
The person switches to another alt, posts, deletes the character afterward. The forum moderators look at it and go, did this character do anything like this before? No? Okay, delete the thread as a warning but apply no penalty.
It only gets to the point where people who are dedicated to rolling up new alts and being disruptive and pervasive before they really start digging in and doing research, because that takes time. They don’t have good tools to do it, because of the way the WoW forums function, where none of the other Blizzard forums work the same way. They play whack-a-mole with individual posts instead of being able to easily see a pattern of behavior. For that reason, trolls can run rampant for way longer than they should be allowed to before anything significant actually happens to them.
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I edited the OP to list a couple of posters putting more reasons for b-tags
And due to how forum polls work, what do you think ppl did with an army of alts?
No they don’t. The high elf customization forum thread craze of the last 4 years is proof enough for that.
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To all of those against Bnet tags on the WoW forums…
You do realize every other Blizzard forum uses BNet Tags right?
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Pro Btagger here, but if the following can be done without showing Btags, or any universal forum name, most of us would likely be happy:
- account wide ignore
- 1 account, 1 voice, can’t hop on other character to like/flag posts and can’t like your post from other characters, etc
Keep in mind, it is not alts that we have an issue with, as we want to be able to switch characters for RP reasons (the RP section of the forums) and fun topics like “rate the tmog”.
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