How do you feel about Dinner being banned

Yeah, Dinner is the hill to die on.
That's gonna stop the second holocaust.
Calling Dinner a racist asshole at every possible opportunity on a board.
Because he's persuaded so many of us.
He's so goddamned popular.
Look at everyone fighting for him to be back.
Our most respected members that everyone loves have rallied to his cause with their brilliant minds.

@El Chup beleives we should rise up against dinner because he routinely over estimates the number of Muslims that are actual animals and that until we drive @Dinner from the board for @El Chup (since he's too powerless to do it alone) wordforge will never be a safe space like it once was.

Did I get that right?

Or is this round 36 of why @gul is a bad owner and @gul's decisions ruin @El Chup's life and until @gul makes the right decision @El Chup will be unable to function on the internet?

Why don't you quit already @gul? You've angered the @El Chup again! He's fragile.

I think the problem is that those "most respected posters" stay silent. One who condone evils is just as guilty as the one who perpetrates it. - MLK Jr.

Says the anonymous troll who rallied against @gul at every given chance during the gtardo scandal.....'cause, ya know, drama.....

This has nothing to do with Gul.

Look, you get points for your heart being in the right place.
It's logic and tactics where I think you get Castle level grades for clumsiness.

This isn't about me. This is about you.

You've just now realized that some people on this board say racist or pseudo racist things. Just now? That's hard to believe. Why didn't you leave 13 years ago? Why didn't you campaign against several other posters in the past? Why didn't you leave in a huff all those other times when things got "too racist" for you?

In reality it's just another fight you get to pick with @gul who you have hated since he took over despite being politically aligned with him.

For the record I think you ought to just stick around. Your boss won't mind. WF is better with you here. But if you leave and come back like a yoyo all the time don't be surprised at the reception you get.

Oh fuck he's quoting Martin Luther King now

I am just going to sit here fishing for a bit. Something tells me it is a good spot. Wouldn't you agree Mr @El Chup ?

When I first found this place, there was a guy by the named of Neutered Zone Refugee. I distinctly remember him because he was the first clear cut shit stirrer I remembered, and everyone piled on this guy. I think he got permabanned eventually but even in the heavily conservative culture that was 2005 Wordforge, he took shit in the BR for speculating how best he could fire a flamer that worked for him and not get sued.

Then there were rep campaigns against Tasvir.

Mewa used to get called out on the mat for his racist comments.

Black Dove was driven away for years for that comment about Mewa's kid getting slam fucked.

The board ganged up on creep ass Ted Wolf as he began harassing Mrs. A when the staff turned a blind eye.

@phantomofthenet quit staff to neg bomb Face as a show of how dedicated h÷ was to get rid of him and fight with the only thing he had that he thought would work.

The point here being, the community was more proactive in making the unwanted element here very known.

I'm indifferent about it. I prefer lunch anyway.

I forgave you as well.

For Dindin

Watching him come unglued on TK is pretty funny.

Nah, this was better.

The internet has jaded people. Instead of rounding on hateful shit stirrers and running them out on a rail, it's become much more preferable to use them for entertainment. To take the idea to the real world, it's why the U.S. has President Trump now, instead of someone sane and reasonable. The media saw an irresistible big, shiny object to bat around instead of getting serious work done, and the end result was a giant clusterfuck. Even so, there are people either stupid or ignorant enough to tell everyone "hey, let's give him a chance!" because there are a significant number of people out there who can't see beyond the limits of their own little world.

@Dinner is a bigot. In any decent community, he'd be met with all kinds of scorn heaped upon him until he moved away. Gturner is a shit stirrer. In any decent community, he'd have been met with all kinds of scorn heaped upon him until he moved away. I'm not entirely certain where many of you stand on having Dinner around. I do know that many of you want Gturner back. He's too entertaining and it's too much fun for some of you to poke at him, getting off a number of cutting remarks which I'm sure made you feel good about yourselves, but didn't affect him in any way.

For @Ramen, I'd have permabanned him. Yeah, I know, "fascist!" and all of that tired bullshit. I don't care. I have standards that say when someone openly advocates the lynching of a member of this board, knowing that member is black, that person has stepped beyond any reasonable line, and their ass would get the heave-ho by myself. I don't care if he's a founder, don't care if he's been here for years, I have ethical rules I follow that say unmitigated bigotry is vile in its own right, but when directly targeted at an actual member of any community, becomes unacceptable on any level.

I think there are some things for which we are too willing to let slide because we don't want to seem mean, we don't want to seem unpopular, or as going against the grain. Most folks don't like to make waves, except in good fun, so actually being a disciplinarian on an issue becomes thorny, and when someone steps up to do just that, they stick out. It's why I don't fault @gul at all for wanting to clean shit up. It makes you unpopular to be the guy going around telling people to quit pissing on the furniture, especially if everyone else is laughing at or with the offender.

People talk about leaving because they don't like where the direction of the board might head. For me, it's whether the board decides bigotry, and the entertainment of incessant deceit and disruption, is something to follow through on, or not. For some of you, it's about the rules getting a little too close for comfort. For others, still, it's about worrying whether or not the whitespaces in-between the rules have grown smaller, and if so, whether or not it becomes harder to maneuver. The past year, we saw the term "lawyerballing" come up an awful lot, and it's because for so long there have been people who have flitted in and out between the whitespaces of the rules, where they've tiptoed on the line and stayed just inside, in order to walk away blameless when someone else gets slammed for breaking a rule.

Now all of that is in doubt, and they find it uncomfortable, because people like to think they can get some leeway when they step over the line. We all hope when we break a rule someone gives us some leeway to walk back from it. We don't like to be wrong, we don't like to be corrected, and when someone is banned for what appears to be no reason, it shocks and worries some. Will they be next? What did he do? I mean, he may have been a general nuisance, but he didn't break the letter of the law, right?

People depend upon those things. We like to think that when someone does something bad, the letter of the law will catch them. People also like to hope that if *they* do something bad, they've skirted the letter of the law enough to wriggle free of the hook, and slip away. That's human nature. What happened here was that Gturner violated the spirit of the law, and since the spirit of the law is, by its nature, more of a buffer instead of hard and fast rules, that makes the old fight or flight response kick in. The general consensus when it comes to Wordforge and it's rules, is that Wordforge always errs on the spirit side of the law. Someone can do something wrong, but you go easy on them, unless they really hit hard on the letter of the law, in which case most people are fine with that person getting warned.

Gturner was banned. I'm glad. He served no other purpose but to troll, derail, and deceive as many people as he could while he was here. That he lasted so long at Wordforge is actually rather impressive. TrekBBS was smart enough to get rid of him relatively quickly, but he lingered around here, and people kept engaging him like he was an actual poster who had cohesive thoughts and ideas, and so every thread he was in would de-evolve into shit slinging dross. I mean, if Wordforge wants to be known as the board that says "fuck conversation, let's just fling shit," okay, but you'll attract exactly the type of people who love that kind of thing. It would start in the Red Room, but it sure wouldn't stay in the Red Room.

This is getting long, isn't it?

When I came to Wordforge back in 2004, I joined because it was somewhat verboten at TrekBBS, and I wanted to see just what kind of message board could cause something like that. I found out, and I liked it. It wasn't the shit slinging, you could find that anywhere, though with today's internet you'll find it everywhere, sadly. I was drawn in by the patchwork of personalities. So many different opinions, and the way people expressed them! Yeah, there was flaming, and trolling, but the vast bulk of the discussion was actual discussion. People exchanged ideas. When I had started moving threads into the Violet Room, I had to massively scale back how I was going to do it. You know why? Because there were so many Gturner non-sequiturs in so many threads, that I knew parsing it all and reassembling it would take weeks. I had to settle for threads where Gturner was the OP, and then work from there. He had so filled up the Red Room with bile, that it would have taken more than one person to effectively remove it all relatively quickly.

What's worse is that so many people had become used to the smog. They had become accustomed to the cesspool of posts he had made in the Red Room. He had to go. You can disagree with me until the cows come home, until the Sun expands and swallows the Earth, but he had to go. So he was banned. He was banned with a reason, just not one people could find stated as a letter of the law, and so it was disregarded as a fake excuse, or stealth banning. Some of you were so desperate to decry the action that you were using @The Flashlight as an authoritative source.

I was given the order to ban him. I flipped the switch. Not only do I not regret it, I'd do it again. We could have waited for him to violate a letter of the law, but it never would have happened. He had been trolling all of you for far too long, he had been here and learned every one of your buttons, when to press, when to back away, and he knew how to play around in the whitespace of the rules. One of us decided enough was enough, fuck that asshole, ban him. She made the right decision. I stand by it as well.

This was a long post. For some of you it might get you to see the reasoning behind things, or why I think like I do. For others it will be more fodder for how I'm a fascist, or a man child, or whatever gets your dick hard today. I take comfort in the fact that Donald Trump thinks Breitbart is real news, so if he can think that, you can be just as wrong about me, too. For the rest, you might not like the authoritarian edge, but authority has to exist, even in small communities, and sometimes it's going to be wielded in an unpopular manner. Doesn't make it wrong, though.

Well, I'm off to take care of other things. I'd say it has been fun, and it was for a while, but the last few months have not been fun. Taking care of the board, keeping things running smoothly, I did it because I cared about the community. I wanted Wordforge to be here when people needed it, or just wanted to poke and pal around. When new add-ons were needed, they were installed, and fast. Updates, I did them when they were really needed. I kept backups of the database, the board software, everything, on my computer, because it was vitally important that Wordforge was preserved in the event of any unforeseen circumstance. I still care about a great many of you, but there's no way in hell I'd ever do it again.

You can write pages and pages, but gturner's ban will never be the same as others. If people are banned "because they are trolls", when do folks like Flashie, Faceman, Dayton and half a dozen others go? At least with people like Dinner and Ramen, if they post unacceptable content then it's pretty clear cut. But with gturner, as much as his content was of little value, and as much as he was clearly trolling, he was banned because you guys didn't like him, and I think that was made worse by him being an alt-right mouthpiece. He did sit in the "white space" as you call it, but at the time of his banning there was no rule against what he was doing...and the disagreement over just how much his content was not political opinion posts is such that his banning will never be cut and dried. If you wanted him gone then you could've changed the rules, or, at the very least, sent him a string of clear, unequivocal warnings about his board activities. You did neither. What's more, both you and the one you told to pull the trigger wimped out the second that there wasn't universal agreement over the way it had been handled, which speaks volumes about the shakiness of the decision.

Gturner is a troll twat who adds little to any community, but his content was within the rules that have been in place here for a long, long time. He broke no rule and should not have been banned....and it's the height of hypocrisy that you and others will make whatever excuses you can to justify his banning because he was a spammer, while happily condoning a daily stream of hate speech from others, which in my opinion is far more nasty and insidious than anything gtardo offered up. There is no consistency at all. You aren't opposing what damages the community. You only oppose what you personally couldn't tolerate.

Did you know Breitbart is real news? You're an excellent example of someone limited to only what they can see in their little world. You've presumed my guilt, you've made assumptions about my motivations, and you're telling me that what I said isn't what I really think at all. Congratulations, you don't need anyone to talk to, you have yourself to build your own little world, and that's all you need.

Where did I say anything about Breitbart?

You're running a very dangerous line by claiming that anyone who disagrees with your banning of gtardo must be some sort of ignorant fool who can't see the righteous nature of the actions of you and your compadres. You seem to have great difficulty in understanding than one does not need to like gturner or in any way value his content to disagree with the decision to ban him or question the manner in which it was done, or, indeed, highlight the inconsistency in your supposed values. You also act like anyone who disagrees with your take on it is an idiot, which is pretty offensive.

You get called a manchild for exactly this sort of immature, pissy post. The fact is that you get petulant because people aren't lining up to agree with you on the gturner banning, but when others express concerns about the community and what might be damaging it you don't want to know and bury your head in the sand because you don't see it as your problem.

Where is the John who has insisted for years that he is a great compassionate and loving person? The John of today is quite content to turn a blind eye to constant hate content. If that's so, he's in no position to post up essays crying about just how how he's all misunderstood and deeply cares about WF, all because he couldn't hack an alt-right spammer. I'm not convinced you care about this community as you claim. It seems that what you care about is what you personally would have it be and what does and does not bother you - and fuck all the rest.

So Dinner is the next whipping boy.

wow...
what's really mindblowing is there's four more pages about it since your linking point!

oh, and TK loads slow.
might be a metaphor...

Anyone dumb enough to take their trolling and/or flaming outside of the Red Room is our next whipping boy. Dinner chose to flame John and Chup's ex in the Help Desk, a designated no-troll/flame forum, so I gave him a week to cool his heels.

It's a joke that refers back to the notion that there are people who believe what they want about me, and nothing I say will sway them. You'll have to re-read the original post.

Never said righteous. Just something that needed to be done.

Except for the paragraphs in my post where I explained how people may feel about it, and that not all of it is because they like gturner. Did you read the post or just skim it quickly and ready your answers? I'm assuming the former, but deep down I'm thinking the latter.

It's almost as if I should have said something about the community in my post. You'd sure know if I did, having read it, right?

Right here. He never left. He did stop coddling people who liked to keep biting him, though.

I'm not sure what you mean here at all.

I'm not convinced you read my post. Fortunately for you, that's an easy remedy. For me, however, I can't prove to you something for which you will not believe regardless of what I say. That's what I meant when I mentioned that you create your own little worlds. You could have a wonderful conversation with a dozen posters, and yet be the only one actually on the board. You fill people's mouths with exactly what you think they're saying rather than what they actually said, and then you base your answers off of that. You don't need people at all, which I'm sure must be a time-saver. You're no better than the guy who falls for people like Trump, because you disregard what he says and fill in your own narrative instead. That's why people will still be surprised when Trump does what he does, even though he said that's exactly what he would do, because not one of them actually listened. They already knew, just like you already know without my ever saying anything. You don't need me, Chup. You have yourself to keep you company.

Which is kind of funny because I don't even know what the hell he said. I've had him on ignore for weeks.

A personal attack from the" kind, loving and compassionate" John.

Instead of offering personal insults, why not actually think about what I said, most importantly in respect of your lack of consistency?

Well, you see, (insert assumption here) back when (fast forward through this entire paragraph), and that's why I do my best to (assume lying here, because no one actually believes people are real on the internet). All in all, (assume insult because of disagreement), but that doesn't mean it has to be so.

Maybe Im just old fashioned, but when I first started posting on message boards the answer that came up every time someone complained about a troll was ...

"If you don't like what someone posts then ignore is your friend. This is an open forum where all ideas are welcome."

What might seem to be trolling to you could mean common sense to someone else. It works because the moment you start banning people for how they think you enter a slippery slope where mods with personel vendettas cough*gul*cough*john*cough start ruining the community.

Maybe if you're lucky, I'll go away and you can wallow in your own crapulence without Smithers standing over you, disapprovingly, to bring you down from the high.

I could care less whether you stay or go. Unlike yourself, I dont have a vendetta to run everyone off that doesn't fit neatly in my own little fantasy world.

I know. Your fantasy world involves other things, like kids going hungry, and old people dying from lack of medical care, yet somehow everyone who deserves it is rich. That's another topic, though.