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?
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.”
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.