Durova wrote:

Alec, I appreciate that you're giving me some credit for stepping forward

to

take the heat for my own mistake.

Well, I appreciate your kind words. I'm a little confused by your statement of "You're wrong, but I'm not going to tell you how". Obviously, you must know that I can't actually take that on faith, but I will keep looking. ****** Fair enough. I hope you also suppose it's also fair that the drubbing I've gotten is a very strong disincentive against anyone else stepping forward, or against me saying more than I already have. There is already enough information on the table to disprove your hypothesis.

Now if you want to know why I'm on that cyberstalking list, there are several reasons. Have the decency to suppose that it is what it is, and leave the good people alone.

The cyberstalking list, problematic though it is, isn't as enigmatic as the investigations list. The investigations list was clearly formed just for the purpose of gathering evidence to support bans. The cyberstalking list might have a claim to being "support-group-esque", but the investigations list, by its name, summary, and the content of its messages, certainly appears to be a place designed to influence on-wiki actions. ****** The investigations list didn't even exist yet when I sent out the e-mail. And remember that no community standard existed, except general agreement that certain things shouldn't be discussed onsite. Even though certain methods of parsing information look obvious and trivial once they become generally known, one thing an investigator counts on is finding that kind of mistake.

So on a really basic level - something every sysop deals with - there's the newish user with a particular interest in one article who gets a 3RR block and thinks he's very clever to just register a new account. He's never heard of WP:SOCK and thinks we never have either. So he goes right back to the same article and reverts again. Sock gets blocked too. Most people come around if we talk to them at that point, but a few would rather outsmart us again. So that fellow decides to evade 3RR by doing some of his edits logged in and some of them unlogged on his underlying IP address. Yeah, we catch that too. If he continues down that path he's eventually going to get to tricks that take real effort to address. And the handful who become long term vandals are dedicated people.

-Durova