Hall of Shame

I've been skulking around on in the internet since 1996, and you don't spend that amount of time sending emails, posting on message boards, newsgroups, setting up social networking accounts, and meeting people online without making a few enemies. As there is no way to read subtle intentions, sarcasm and irony, and as there is almost no accountability for things you say, adverse situations can escalate pretty quickly. Even so, I have kept to some simple guidelines for myself, chief amongst them, the avoidance of personal abuse in favour of debating ideas. In fact, I summarised this neatly when I was asked to moderate the Debates forum of opi den:

Sadly, people treat their opinions as though they were extensions of their personalities and not subject to debate. This leads to all sorts of misunderstandings where people think I'm attacking them personally, when in reality I've said nothing at all about them personally. In fact, most of the time, I don't have any personal information with which to offend them. But the feeling persists...

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The point of this page is to have a giggle at how people (like you and me!) get so offended so easily by so little on the internet. In particular, it's about people attacking me, not about me attacking people. If you're one of the people on this page, and you feel I've misrepresented you in some way, then please email me. But honestly, you'd probably be better off just being a grown-up about it.

The Other Zone: "honestly quite obnoxious" - A*4*J

Let's start with an easy one: our old friend A*4*J, whose exploits are known to you all. The line in question has been blown up for ease of vision:

As I have noted before, Christians seem to be deficient in irony detection. Otherwise he would have spotted the problem in calling me "ad hominem filled" and "obnoxious" in the one sentence.

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Necrotic Obsession: "a fuckin flea" - Renfield

This always makes me laugh. The guy who runs the board posts as Renfield, and we used to bounce off each other in (what I had assumed was) a good-natured way. I had managed to defeat his arguments on the death penalty and I was in the middle of dealing with his ill-researched defence of peak oil, when this happened:

I've cut out the surrounding tissue, but the original thread is still active, if you want to read the whole thing. The context should be obvious though. As you can see, what set him off this particular time was my idea that there may be other ways to allocate resources apart from capitalism. It's also instructive to note that this thread (among others) strongly indicates that the "people" who are "tired" of my "shit" comprise Renfield.

I was banned from the entire message board soon afterwards. Every single poster who said anything good about me (without repenting) was also banned. In fact, even to this day, just mentioning "solo1" can induce confused paranoia in the admins. It's nice to know that as we wend our way through life, we can touch people in such profound ways.

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UCC Sci-Fi Society: "fickle and weak-minded" - Bobo

Yeah, I was great friends with a girl on this board but then she went all psycho and stopped talking to me for no reason and really lashed into me.

Despite getting along quite well, she thought I did Something Bad. Instead of asking me, she assumed it was a serious breach of her Code of Friendship. If I had actually done something hurtful, I would be happy to apologise. However, efforts to find the exact nature of the offence proved unfruitful: lots of abuse, but not a single piece of information. Sadly, it got to the stage where the boards stopped being fun, due to the tidal wave of gibberish from her IRL fan club every time I posted (this would be the main part of the "reasons" referred to in the email above). I tried to advance in another direction by posting a massive missive in honour of Emile Zola. The irony, bathos and lulz went completely over the heads of most of the posters, and I elected to retire indefinitely.

This email was part of an effort to get some straight answers. Apparently I should "apologise to those I have wronged". I have no idea who's she's talking about, or what I'm supposed to have done to them. In fact, I imagine it would also come as a surprise to "them". Eventually I discovered that the offences were more a product of her mind than anything else. This was a great relief to me. I offered to explain exactly what really happened, but she prefers to believe her own stories, which is probably for the best.

Everything about this is funny in retrospect: the feverish attempts to look casual (she mentions that she doesn't care three times in this email alone); the cynical attempt to mask her hatred as concern for the other posters; the pathetic attempt at a threat; the thinly-veiled jealousy over my other online friends; the implication that she's somehow a "better" friend than I am... it's all good.

Update July 2009: I started posting on the board again, and they're still posting shit about it. Over two years afterwards. Sometimes I really wish I had tits.

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The Other Zone II: "i actually despise u" - Jer

Again, what I assumed was some good-natured tomfoolery was unmasked as genuine hatred towards me on The Other Zone. As this exchange occurred in a Shout Box, the text should be read from the bottom up to preserve continuity.

When he learned that I had been made Admin, he promptly posted a dramatic resignation from the site. The screenshot above is just one of around five or six, all full of personal abuse directed at me, seemingly out of nowhere.

My theory (although I have nothing to back it up, really) is that he was trying to goad me into banning him, which seems to be a superior outcome for these people than just not posting. However, he didn't bank on my extreme reluctance to ban anyone. And if he really did have something against me, I should probably nail down exactly what that is. He managed to resist all my efforts to discover the problem. Either that, or there wasn't a problem at all. You do the math.

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Fanhost Networks: "a skanky ho" - Winter

Codename "Winter" was the moderator of the Whatever forum on fanhost. He had a reputation for being abusive, promoting favouritism and causing several posters to quit the forum. When he found the forum where they were posting (hiding from him), he followed them and harassed them there instead. I was one of only two posters who repeatedly called him on his abuse, and regularly exposed him as an idiot. Eventually he got sick of attacking me personally:

Because of the way he phrased it, he managed to convince some of the posters that he was actually talking about Star Wars, which was uncharacteristically passive-aggressive for Winter - usually he was just aggressive. He repeatedly denied any intent to insult my wife or that the message was directed at me in any way. During a lengthy private message marathon, he admitted fault (without actually apologising) and deleted the original thread (something I had neither mentioned nor asked for), presumably to cover his tracks.

Exactly one year later, Winter had disappeared, and I was moderator of the Whatever forum.

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Necrotic Obsession II: "tumor like creature" - psycho

This is what happened: psycho posted photos of herself. Then she took them down. Then she reposted them with some special effects. I said, verbatim: "AW I liked the first ones!" This was taken by more than one person to be a terrible insult. I was mystified, so I asked what the hell was going on. According to the pattern, no one was prepared to actually explain what I had done that was so bad. So I sent a PM to her, assuring her that no harm was meant, and she could call off the dogs. This was the response:

In her defence, psycho has never tried to pretend that she never said this, and to this day maintains that she hates me, and regularly says so on her boards. However, she didn't let any of that stop her from making me a moderator, or getting involved in all sorts of high-spirited tomfoolery on the boards. In other words, she's not going to let a little hatred get in her way.

And neither should you.

Update 21 September 2009: She's banned me. But never mind. Don't let her put you off posting on the boards, they're a good bunch of people. The lulz here is that I was banned for refusing to respond to an ultimatum about some jailbait photos I saw. No, really. I'm not making this up. Look:

Update 5 October 2009: The whole board has now degenerated into a opi love-fest. Trolling anyone who questions the party line is encouraged, rather brutally in some cases: opi apparently fails to understand that a troll posting in her defence is still a troll. Bad admin decisions have killed her boards, chasing off all the interesting and fun posters (the "good bunch of people" mentioned above just don't post anymore - every single post they make gets viciously attacked, regardless of content), and she can't even see it. Every attempt to be reasonable about this has been ignored or mocked. Sound familiar?

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We Hate Barry Purcell: "a ghost-eating c**t"" - Ronan

The above screen grab is a representative sample. Res ipsa loquitur. The last time I checked, there were 32 members. More details, and how to join: We Hate Barry Purcell.

Update 21 December 2009: This Facebook group no longer exists. No one's quite sure what happened, but it looks like someone reported it (not me or anyone that I know of). It seems this particular avenue of lulz has been permanently closed.

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EDF: "Dickhead" - Cash

This is just a sample of the fifteen bans that were handed down to me during my sojourn at EDF. Three of those bans were directly and completely my fault, and I deserved them thoroughly. I was screwing around and generally being a dick, which is fair enough. The remainder of the bans were by turns mysterious, the result of ad hoc rule-changes, shoddy adminning, or self-admitted personal vendettas. The full story of the wonderful relationship between myself and this board deserves is here.

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