| I'm the Lobsters admin and I enforced this ban. You misread the modlog, only jart's invitee i2 was sockpuppeting. As jart is here claiming that this is all mistaken sockpuppeting, let me explain what happened. Lobsters has had serious problems with users who try to exploit the site for self-promotion, and it's more serious for us than HN when a few votes is enough to move something to our homepage. As part of addressing it, we have a bright-line rule prohibiting new users from submitting stories from new, unseen domains in their first 70 days on the site. Five hours after jart invited woodrush, at 2022-01-12 02:26, they tried to violate the rule and got this error message: > woodrush.github.io is an unseen domain from a new user. We restrict this to discourage self-promotion and give you time to learn about topicality. Skirting this with a URL shortener or tweet or something will probably earn a ban. At 2022-01-12 02:40, jart submitted the exact same link to break the restriction, and woodrush submitted several posts from that domain. After that, jart started submitting stories from all of her invitees to circumvent this rule, which anyone can verify by comparing timestamps on her submitted stories at https://lobste.rs/newest/jart to creation dates for her invitees at https://lobste.rs/u#jart. On top of repeatedly breaking a rule that has a big red background and explicitly warns of a ban, two of jart's invitees were manually warned and banned for other inappropriate self-promotion. Finally, when another of her invitees started obvious sockpuppeting, I looked at the invite tree, saw this pattern of abuse, and cleaned up after it. To rebut another claim repeated a couple times elsewhere in the comment tree, all banned users get an email notifying them of a ban with the Reply-To header set to my email: https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/blob/master/app/mailers... None of the users banned in this action have clicked reply to explain how I've made a mistake enforcing an unambiguous rule of ours. |