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If a very sensitive posting of a critical nature has been posted on a forum - it can be quickly removed from public view by 'forum sliding.' In this technique a number of unrelated posts are quietly pre-positioned on the forum and allowed to 'age.' Each of these mis-directional forum postings can then be called upon at will to trigger a forum slide. The second requirement is that several fake accounts exist, which can be called upon, to ensure that this technique is not exposed to the public. To trigger a forum slide and flush the critical post out of public view it is simply a matter of logging into each account both real and fake and then replying to pre-positioned postings with a simple 1 or 2 line comment. This brings the unrelated postings to the top of the forum list, and the critical posting slides down the front page, and quickly out of public view. It is difficult or impossible to censor the posting, so the object post gets lost in a sea of unrelated and un-useful postings. By this means it becomes effective to keep the readers of the forum reading unrelated and non-issue items while posts approved by the group can be prominently displayed.
A coordinated group of posters that are extremely passionate about a certain issue(s) can rapidly move posts that are contrary to their positions down a page in an attempt to make it "disappear" from obvious view, and do this repeatedly if they see it as important to their cause. They could move posts favorable to their cause to the top of a page as well with this same device.
Interesting device. I wonder if any individual or group has ever tried this at DU? DU has such a large membership that it would seem to be a prime target for this type of activity. |