Regarding the possibility of 'raids' here, it's actually quite difficult as I personally vet anyone who wants to be a member (to avoid spammers and bots) nowadays, and I even stopped all new inscriptions when we were voting on the book of the year last time round.
If I notice a particularly active and contentious thread in the future I will be much more careful about allowing any potential sock puppets to join. In fact, it might be an idea to send me a PM just in case.

I do think the raid idea is far-fetched.

It's happening again, only this time about reviews on a big book selling site...
Three negative reviews about a certain familiar looking book seem to attract a lot of comments, with a certain writing style 

You cannot read the comments if you use your phone b.t.w.

Good point. I'll let someone else decide if it was an imitation or the real thing. A couple days ago was the first time I heard the term raid, so I wanted to bring it up.

I spent about 2 minutes scrolling up and down on that page. I was slightly familiar with the subject because it also consumed the USCF boards. Then I returned to the post you linked to and read just that one. Mig's final words were:
Quote:

P.S. I don't consider myself anonymous here, semi-anonymous at best. My handle is ironic, and was given to me many years ago by a GM.

I think you *are* getting the point quite well. Raiding as different from sockpuppetry is not *my* theory originally; it was advanced by someone on El Reg. I don't know for sure which one we encountered, but it's worth considering it might not have been sockpuppets. Or it might have been both, with maybe a troll or two in there as well. Is the idea of raiding really so far-fetched? It sounds like old-fashioned tribalism with a virtual twist. I would have said that some of posts we saw were also far-fetched, and yet there they were.

As for the IM and GM, I follow your thinking. A cursory reader might jump to conclusions based on which side the IM+GM took. So that's a real issue. But a careful reader should see the relative merits of the arguments. And my hope is that a cursory reader would not be strongly invested in their conclusion, so it could change with more exposure to the message boards.

an ordinary chessplayer wrote on 12/05/18 at 15:57:54:

When I agreed it was a raid, I didn't realize you wanted to distinguish between sockpuppetry and raiding.

What happened here seemed like sockpuppetry and I still think it probably was. But how is raiding different? Are you saying someone somehow scored points on a different forum/site for coming here to defend the book against anything remotely critical? How would that even work technically with the point-scoring / karma / whatever? Sounds a bit far-fetched to be honest.

But I'm probably not getting your point.

I'm confused but also not too internet savvy these days. Can you spell things out even more?

When I read that thread (quite quickly -- skimmed is a better word), I got the impression that a certain author was creating sockpuppet accounts to promote his book and provoke arguments. Given that I liked the book, where the author came across as quite level-headed, this was unwelcome and unfortunate. But also very strange. I have seen stranger, so I chalked it up to the fact that the world we live in now is a strange place (cf. the Trump presidency, the Eagles winning the Super Bowl, Elon Musk dating Grimes) and moved on.

But now you theorize that in fact this was the work of some buffoons on another website intentionally causing harm to this site, and the author in question had nothing to do with it? Am I getting this right? I would like to understand, if only to make sure I am not inappropriately judging the author for something he did not do.

Stigma wrote on 12/04/18 at 23:31:21:


I would hope that it will be pretty clear to anyone visiting that thread in the future what happened there.

A. It happened once, it could happen again.
B. I don't think it went well last time, I get the impression you might agree.
C. If your house burns down, do you just say, it's over move on? Or do you ask what you might have done differently? For next time (see A).