Where is the Tadano Thread?

No, you're not losing your mind. I woke up yesterday morning with 16 mostly flames about the thread. The thread appears to have drawn an element of people not interested in talking about baseball. Anyone interested in the details is welcome to look it up on Google's cache or the WayBack Machine. It's hard for something to truely disappear on the Internet.

Can't you trace their IP address to see where they send them from and take legal action? Although it might not be worth it.

Back in September of 2001, when some kid with too much time on his hands started posting racists comments and attacking the character of many on this site, I looked into it.

I started by asking him to be nice. That didn't work.

I started deleting his posts to show him that his words have no staying power. That didn't work.

I then blocked his ISP at the firewall. He was right back on coming from a different ISP from Texas. (At first I thought there were two people, one in New York and the other in Saitama. Not sure any more.) I blocked that ISP, and he was on again from elsewhere. The kid may not have the ability write an application, but he did know how to use anonymizers.

As a last resort, I moved to moderating all posts. I felt bad at first, as though I were doing something to harm free speech. However, I gradually started looking at it as a Good Thing. You have no idea how many people can't tell the difference between "their," "there," and "they're"! "A lot" is not spelled "alot." And these are people who's native language is English, as best I can tell. There's even been one person claiming to be an English teacher in the U.S. who couldn't even capitalize proper nouns like "Japan." I'm a bad speller myself, but after I started moderating, these things really started to bother me.

Then there are many non-native English speakers. I recall "Peter-the-Jerk" (not the name I gave him, but it fits), a guy who started posting on the J-Ball mailing list a number of years ago. He came in claiming to be a personal friend of some MLB ball player who was going to teach the Japanese how to play baseball. The guy asked a lot of questions in a rather rude way, insulting everybody on the the list, and not being thankful to those of us who answered his questions in a civil tone (though it was hard not to break down and tell him off). He then started making fun of the non-native English speakers who posted to the list, driving some of them away.

I didn't want to see a return of Peter-the-Jerk to my site, so I started working on grammar as well as spelling to make it so that people posting wouldn't have to fear such critisism. (Comment on the content, not the delivery, is my goal.)

Oh, and you'll all be happy to know that this guy's friend, who was supposed to teach the Japanese how to play ball, didn't last much more than a month on the top team. Peter-the-Jerk left without a trace soon after the season started.

Nonetheless, I also started formatting messages to look better in HTML, with as consistant a look as possible.

On the down side, I'm constantly worried that my moderation makes all comments look much alike - kind of generic. On the up side, I think that the quality of posts (except where the Tadano thread was headed) has been improved to make this community look very professional. Well, as professional as a bunch of ametuer fans can look. (I've had one person wanting to post about the Pete Rose issue here because he knew that it'd get a fair hearing with intelligent responses as opposed to what such a thread would turn into on the MLB.com forums. I rejected the thread, but am flattered that this site is held in such high regard.)

As for taking legal action, peoples' opinions are their own, even if they're racist. I don't want to be a censor, but I'd rather not spread hatred due to racial, political, or sexual orientations. (Dislike of particular organizations for the specific crimes they have committed against baseball [Giants] or the computer community [Microsoft/SCO], I have no problem with. Both have done a great deal of good, but certain aspects of their game are pure evil.)

With MyDoom going around now, Blaster, and even CodeRed II (from 2001) still infecting Windows machines, anonymizers have hundreds of thousands of unsuspecting proxy servers through which to allow people to post. I've tried getting ISPs to get their customers to patch their machines after attack attempts on this one, but it's a losing effort. It takes up too much time with little to no change in the number of attacks.

I have been notified that some people who have posted pyrimid scheme SPAM to this site, after my reporting them, have had their accounts suspended. SPAM is easy for ISP abuse desks to understand. The legality of hate speech is not so easy to understand. So moderation is the only effective technique against these people right now.

Sorry for the long rant. Quite a bit off topic, but it's a policy that people need to understand - as well as the history behind why?

Hi, I have been visiting this forum everyday for the past few years now. Once in a blue moon, I post a message. I was wondering if it wouldn't be better if you required everyone who wanted to post to register first. That would make it a "little" harder to post, and the number of "bad" posts would be reduced. Also, you wouldn't have to moderate all posts. You could have a particular list of posters you trusted and let them do their own thing.

Just a suggestion to make your life a little easier.

Ah, the power of the Internet and the abuse thereof.

This is your board Westbaystars-san. You created it. You're not a journalist who must ascribe to fair and impartial reporting and airing of all opinions. If you decide something is inappropriate, it's your perogative to toss it out. If I can be denied entry in some nice restaurants in Kansai even after making a perfectly acceptable presentation, you can bar the moron bent on spreading his vile on your site.