Starting a new thread about here because:

• the other one is just too vicious for my taste;
• abuse of the tools is so routine as to be uninteresting as a general topic.

Immediately before posting a long retirement statement, admin AnmaFintero used semi-automated tools to replace their old signature with their new one. I thought this was a no-no?

I have no way of knowing who did it, but several recent postings to their talk page were also revision deleted.

There are possibly identity issues involved here, but I don't see how changing one username to another actually protects anyone, and without knowing what the deleted content was, it is hard to know if this was an abuse of the tools.

When her previous account was renamed, the log entry was hidden.

She is not, and never was, an administrator. Please let this go.

Well that piqued even my interest.

Let what go? Don't tell me that someone is manhandling Brad's man handle!

My mistake. I didn't read the original threads, but comments made by various posters in the thread about the recent forum outage lead me to think that she was an admin. I have corrected my original post.

Brad, I don't understand the level of antipathy toward this person and I have no desire to dig into the backstory, but there seem to be some out-of-the-ordinary things happening in this case. I am aware that the retirement message mentions stalkers, but this doesn't look like a serious attempt to make an old account disappear. It actually just connects the two accounts together even more.

Especially when they make a lot of self-referential edits.

I'm profoundly tempted to say something. But I won't.

The out-of-the-ordinary thing here is that this person has no idea what she's doing, or more specifically, how to go about reducing one's search-engine footprint once loss-of-anonymity panic begins to set in. We're used to dealing with WP'ers who have at least minimal know-how in this area. Nor does she understand that a lengthy Wikideath-like goodbye message on the user page is the worst way to leave Wikipedia.

As I mentioned in the other thread, I don't think she realized that DMCA complaints are essentially a public process, if the person being complained about wants it to be. She might not have even realized that defending even a totally specious copyright claim cannot be done under a pseudonym.

I myself am additionally culpable here, because not only did I post the promotional blurb for the never-to-be-written fantasy novel, I also was one of the members here who were snookered (by Mr. 0's vague references to his being banned because of Collectonian) into thinking she was an admin. Obviously I should have checked that - the fact is, once someone is an admin, we tend to assume they've accepted the possibility that they might be treated as "limited public figures" here within the context of Wikipedia, and that they won't freak out when someone says something horrible about them.

Another problem is that we forget that people who aren't already familiar with WR don't know that the "Annex" forum isn't Google-indexed. The amount of "damage" to Collectonian's "brand" from my having posted the blurb, assuming there's actually a "brand" to be damaged, was negligible because someone looking for it on Google would never have seen our reference to it. But she wouldn't have known that unless she was much more familiar with WR than she was.

There's no secret about who did the deletion. It was Nihonjoe. he cites "Other defamation/personal information issues: WP:RTV and privacy issues".

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...%3AAnmaFinotera