Why aren’t “reverse” posters banned?

Hi there and thanks for getting in touch. This is something that comes up fairly regularly so we do get that people are annoyed by reverse threads.

We tend to take them on a case by case basis, depending on what else is going on. So sometimes we'll delete them if we feel that's the only option, but where we can keep a conversation flowing, we will.

Reverse threeads aren't strictly against our Talk guidelines but they are, let's say, frowned upon, just because it doesn't feel like playing fairly and we can see that people who have replied might understandably feel their time has been wasted. We do see the temptation to use a 'reverse' in order to gain a totally impartial view of a situation, so what we'll often do if an OP admits to a reverse, is to edit the first post to make it clear what's happened and to save anyone else having their time and energy wasted. We do make it clear that reverses can annoy people and aren't really to be encouraged, but we don't tend to think of it as a banning offence, unless someone were doing so repeatedly and only in order to cause trouble or troll.

Hope that explains our position a bit more. As always, please do hit the report button if you have concerns. We're always happy to take a look.