User blog comment:OWOPKekistan/Yoctoduodecillion/@comment-27516045-20191013012051/@comment-39541634-20191026172727

@Username5243

I'm just relieved to see that you're finally beginning to see what's going on here. It's about time.

I will also way that what you're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg. You've already admitted that you don't have the time to browse the wiki very often. So let me tell you: as a person who has been closely following what's going here for many months, the situation is far far worse then you think. Statistically speaking, the odds of Edwin not having any benign-looking sockpuppets is very close to zero. Had you spent as much time as myself on this wiki, you would have realized that yourself a long time ago.

I will not repeat my earlier mistake of trying to point out exactly which users are genuine and which aren't. The probablity of getting a false positive is too great. But I can tell you that statistically, there's something very fishy going on here.

As for continuing the discussion: The best place would be in private, like by email or something like that. The second best place would be here, on this wiki, where everything is transparently recorded. I actually don't think that having this discussion here is such a bad idea. This wiki has a problem, and I see nothing wrong with talking about this problem on the wiki (I also see nothing wrong with doing that on a blog post like this one. It's not like we are in danger of derailing an professional discussion about the merits of "Yoctoduodecillion").

Discord, OTOH, would be an awful awful choice. It is the worst of both worlds: Real-time, messy and you can bet Edwin is going to do his best to derail our conversation there (I'm betting he will try to do it here as well, but here - at least - we can simply ignore his comments).

At any rate, I'm not sure what continuing this discussion is going to accomplish. The problem we have here is not really solvable. There's no way to tell which user handles are sockpuppets. And even if there was a way (say by analyzing the texts) then there's no way to stop the guy from making new ones. IP blocks are also useless, as the guy is using VPN.

See, that's the real problem. The architecture of wikia is completely ill-equipped to deal with a troll who is this persistent. He doesn't even need to be clever. Just sick in the head, persistent, and heartless enough to continue what he is doing.

(I'm actually quite surprised that such massive trollings don't happen more often on wikia. TBH it rekindles my hope in mankind, to know that such SOBs are so rare).

To summarize, the way I see it, there are only two scenarios by which this nightmare is going to end:

(1) Edwin himself decides to stop (believe me, if that ever happens, you will notice)

(2) We move this wiki to another host, which does have the required features to deal with this kind of mess.

Unfortunately, I don't see either #1 or #2 happening in the forseeable future. Do you?

TL;DR We're screwed.