...the original poster' theory is that it actually defeats the broken windows theory.

The idea with graffiti is apparently to clean it off immediately, thereby eliminating the effect the tagger has had on his environment and removing his motivation.

with the 'continue showing the deleted posts' theory, the poor bugger actually thinks he is achieving something, assuming he doesn't know about it, and therefore has no reason to stop.

What is he achieving if nobody responds?

he is altering his environment.  thats what its all about, this kind of thing is caused by a feeling of helplessness/uselessness and a desire to have an impact on the environment.

It's an interesting point.  Certainly that's an easy fix in the code.

"thats what its all about, this kind of thing is caused by a feeling of helplessness/uselessness and a desire to have an impact on the environment."

Hmm, that is the one thing we all have in common...

trouble is I dont have access to a subversion client here at work, and dont have the inclination to work on the code at home.

if we could berak that deadlock I would be interested in tweaking that and also adding some rough form of registration.

it is kinda neat the way you're the only one who can see your post [if it's been deleted] on the [death knell of argument] JOS groups. After a thousand or two that get sfa in response has to be somewhat demeaning and you'd think the poster would give up.

"you'd think the poster would give up."

this particular poster has shown no inclination to give up for months. I must admit I am genuinely at a loss to understand why.

dedicating your life to ruining a forum is just odd.

Ok, I've modified the code so that deleted posts are gone.  I hope it hasn't caused any other problems.

cool, fast work :)


now if you can just tweak it so whenever a post is deleted their computer gives the poster an electrical shock, we will be nearly there..

The reason for the "deleted posts remain visible to the poster" was for Joel on JoS to feed spammers. If their posts vanish, they keep posting to try and work around whatever algorithm is nailing their posts.

If they post and see their post show up, they're happy and move on, never aware that nobody else can see it.

There wasn't any board spam at the time the system was set up. The reason was simply Joel didn't want to waste time arguing his moderating decisions.

"they're happy and move on"

Unfortunately our particular moron seems to have missed that part of the theory...