I have to admit, I'm pretty confused as to why there's so much resistance to verifying if a deleted post contains a certain bit of content. No one is asking for the post to be restored or the content to be posted. There's no privacy violations being requested or anything other than for verification to be performed.
I'm pretty boggled, honestly. I know what I saw, I know what's in my browser window, I've taken a screen shot of it, there is no doubt in my mind that Werner posted that text. I had no idea Werner was Garrs sock until that point, nor did I have any clue there was so much more to the Werner account than it just being Garr trolling me when I posted the screenshot. Up until that time of Garrs mistake, I had taken zero notice of Werner... I mean, I get trolled much better numerous times a day and I hadn't given it a second thought.
I regret, now, not posting the quote faster and plopping up the screenshot, however when it happened I was confused by the response and it took me about 30 seconds to figure out what happened as I re-read it several times trying to figure out why Werner was making that post until it hit me that Garr screwed up. By the time I quoted it, screen shotted it and got it uploaded, Garr had already deleted Werner version. It would have been much better if I had posted that quote and then Garr followed it with the same text. But my slow reaction time should not be the deciding factor here... if the post contents of the post in question can be verified, I can not see any reason what so ever to not verify it. It doesn't have to be posted, revealed or anything else, other than "Yep, it's the same" or "Nope, Inaba is full of shit."
Is Garr255 somehow financially or otherwise tied to Maged or Theymos? Is there a reason behind these stall tactics? I'm not making any accusations in this space, I am just curious if that may be a source of resistance to a seemingly reasonable request.
I'm in no way a fan of BFL - but on this issue I agree.
I can only see two reasons why they'd not want to verify whether the post was made by werner:
1. They believe bidding up your own auctions with sock-puppets is fine - or at least something they shouldn't try to deter (i.e. something so trivial that they don't want to be involved).
2. They're friendly with Garr AND believe it was his sock-puppet (if they're friends and DON'T think it's his sock-puppet then they'd have already checked).
I disagree with whichever of those is the reason - any deception by someone trying to obtain funds from the public should be exposed if it's simple to do. In this case if werner made the post then with the short time-span there's no reasonable explanation other than that Garr was controlling the account. In theory he could claim he was using it then but not when it bid on his auctions - but I can't see there being a lot of sympathy towards such a claim.