Whatever the normal operating procedure might be, and I confess I had forgotten that only developers can see the IP addresses of registered users) accusations of sockpuppetry are likely to offend the accused. We should be wary of making such accusations and we should refrain from making them on 'public' pages without first posting to the user's talk page.
Geni's spelling in general is not the key issue here. I should have been more explicit: If we are interacting with angry or hostile people we should try to avoid inflaming them further. It is clear that grammatical or spelling errors become sticks with which the criticised can beat us. I suggest that anybody writing anything critical or cautionary should take particular care to ensure that their posts are correct. We seem to have banned one of the POTW subscribers because s/he misspelt the name of one of our user's on the POTW web-site. (Yep! That is right. A user claims that their Wikipedia account was blocked because of what that user wrote on another web-site). If we so dislike misspelling (even if in this case the misspelling yields mild profanity and may have been conscious) then we need to be very careful ourselves.
Theo
On Sat, 16 Apr 2005 10:19:53 +0100, geni wrote:
Several things have goaded this group to higher levels of aggression:
1. The dismissal of their votes (which we did not explain). 2. The accusation that they are sockpuppets; we should check IP addresses before making such accusations.
That would really mess up normal operating precedure (and it's not like there aren't ways round IP tracess anyway)
5. Mis-spelling by geni (they particularly enjoyed 'vanderlism'); I imagine that this would >be no problem were they not already enraged.
If me not being able to spell is now going to be classed as a problem you have around a thousand edits to fix