Decent people make all sorts of mistakes, and many of the commenters mentioned in the article sound like decent people who got caught up in this whole flaming thing like a wild & crazy mob. On the other hand do they deserve to loose their reputations over this?
From a technical point of view if AutoAdmit had blocked search spiders from indexing their forums (or at least the scandalous ones) none of this would have happened in the first place.
As the owner of a semi-popular anonymous forum (with some moderation) I have no sympathy for these idiots. They are decent people caught being in a wild and crazy mob? How is that not contradictory.
Flaming is ok, but calling for these women to be raped and so on is just disturbing and weird and anyone doing it is a bit far from a decent person in any context.
>They are decent people caught being in a wild and crazy mob? How is that not contradictory.
Decent people get caught up in (bad) events all the time. There's the Stanford prison experiment, where students were separated into guards & prisoners with horrifying results.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
This probably isn't a good comparison, but it's an example of decent people doing bad things and following a crowd or mob mentality. There's probably some sociology term for it, where "normal" people act in un-normal vile ways.
In this case, many of the commentors appear to be male and got caught up in cussing out women (or were acting like bullies). Someone started it, and it snowballed into vile and derogatory language. I'm not condoning their actions, but things like can and do happen all the time, and without intervention escalate.
One of the effective things you can do to prevent further wild and crazy mobs from erupting is to make examples of the people who participated in previous ones.
AutoAdmit simply should have banned the abusers from their system and nulled their posting history. It does not take a great deal of imagination to see that an anonymous jerk identifying people and calling for vile acts to be performed on them has no place on your forum, your T.O.S. should take care of that.
From a technical point of view if AutoAdmit had blocked search spiders from indexing their forums (or at least the scandalous ones) none of this would have happened in the first place.