Without mentioning names, I removed myself from a forum after a moderator there treated someone very dear to me with suspicion, derision and contempt, banning him from the boards because of an unprovable allegation of deceit that was wholly irrelevant to his posts on that forum – wholly irrelevant to anything, really.
I’ve had my fill of boards hosted by people who think that because they set up and run the board, it’s their playground, and they can treat people however they want to. When the mods/owners act as though common human standards of decency and politeness do not apply to us because they’ve given of themselves to create a forum, I know that it’s time to pack up and find greener pastures. I’m glad that’s not the case here.
I banished myself from the DC Comics message board because I found myself becoming the object of derision on one of the forums there. There was two forums about that particular comic which were being amalgamated into one, and the redundant board which was about to get deleted had this whole clique of people doing an in-joke running joke type thing just to keep that redundant board alive.
However I made the mistake of saying that I would prefer it if they didn’t continue that in-joke on the new board as I thought that it might crowd out more relevant discussion. Just my opinion, no big deal and hardly a decree from on high. Well after that the clique all ganged up on me and I found myself their all-purpose scapegoat/ridicule object and viola! I am eight years old and being jeered at in the playground again, no fun then, certainly no fun now. So I told 'em to go f-word themselves and left. Which is a shame because I really loved that board and I really miss it.
Should have kept my mouth shut. Silly me, thinking we were mature adults and allowed to disagree with each other. I hate cliques and in-jokes, they choke up a forum like bindweed, ugh!
I was banished from an offline bulletin board once, does that count? At my last job I was going to do a bulletin board for March, on the them of “Women’s History Month.” I made the foolish admission during the planning stages that I wanted to include information on lesbian and transgender women, identifying them as such (e.g. Tammy Baldwin being the first openly lesbian woman elected to Congress, and from our district). I was told, after the concept was reviewed by the president of the freakin’ company, that I couldn’t mention the words “lesbian” or “transgender” because it might offend someone. So I declined the chance to do the board.
Oh, and then there was the time at a different employer that I was going to do a bulletin board for Gay and Lesbian History Month in October and the company closed its doors September 30. I believe the two were unrelated but in the back of my mind I always irrationally thought a little bit…
I frequent a movie-related bulletin board. Usually, it’s fine, even though the population seems to be mostly 20-year-olds who think James Cameron is the best filmmaker ever, and who endlessly debate the “meaning” of The Matrix. There are enough people there, though, who are aware of, say, Douglas Fairbanks Jr that they can converse on the subject.
Until the Apollo hoax popped up as a topic, in response to Fox’s TV show.
Silly me, I tried to fight ignorance. I linked some of the SDMB’s threads. I provided a long explanation of basic critical thinking skills so that future nutball theories would be easily identifiable at a glance. I stressed, over and over, that none of this should be construed as personally attacking anybody who believes in this stuff; most people don’t learn how to think until late in life, if ever.
And things got very, very cold.
Eventually, the brouhaha passed, and we returned to movie chat. Even now, though, months later, it’s clear that I’m a step or two outside the primary circle. I participate, and my opinion is respected, but I’m still “one of those guys.”
Hey Guinastasia? Just wanted to say I’m with you on the Hissyfit and MightyBigTV thing. I occasionally lurk on Hissyfit and am registered on MBTV, but I don’t post much precisely because I don’t condone the way Wing Chun and a few of the other mods there treat people. (Don’t get me wrong, some of the MBTV mods are very sweet. Others, not so much.) There’s no excuse for that kind of behavior.
I’m probably going to wind up getting banned from the Spacebattles message boards, because I like Star Wars too much. That place is Trekkiesville, ladies and gentlemen… it’s amusing (or amazing, I haven’t decided which) to see a poster named “Spocksloverboy” (or something) say “The Enterprise can blast apart black holes from ten lightyears away, and can turn a potato into French Fries in ten seconds!” Most of the mods over there are quite Trekkerpated, too, and they openly support the ruthless bashing of people who disagree with them.
Yeah Legomancer, it was indeed the Legion of Superheroes board. There’s just something about Legion fans…you should have seen what happened when I once said that I was glad that a certain character had been killed off in a lighthearted way and that character’s most fervent fan decided to come to his fictional beloved’s defence…oh you wacky Legion fans!! :rolleyes:
Incidentally if you wanna see a board riven by flamewars and factions, take a look at the Green Lantern board at the DCMBs, man that place is a trainwreck! (who’s better Kyle or Hal? Who cares!)
This post is currently also at another thread about being a troll. I thought it had enough relevance here, too, so here goes:
I was banned on the largest Star Wars group on Yahoo! Club about a year ago, with one of my Yahoo! identies. I got into some petty torment against a person, whom me and a few others hated because he was one of those, “Well I’m better than everyone else because I’ve loved Star Wars since it first came out. All the later fans are scum” people. He would put down newbies, etc. I admit now that was I did was out of line and am ashamed of it (sort of; I’m not going to get into details about what I did), but I managed to set him up through IM, trying to make him look bad at the club. Needless to say, my plan backfired a bit (a few people sided with me, most didn’t) and I was seen as a troll and banned.
Under a different screename, I’ve been waging what appears to be a one-woman war on another MB over whether or not Cleopatra VII was black. I told them she was Macedonian Greek, and the ugliness began. I know have nine people screaming at me that I’m “stealing African-American heritage” and that I’m “Eurocentric” because I dared to challenge popular wisdom’s idea of Cleo’s “blackness”.
I give them ancient testimony, contemporary in Cleopatra’s time. I gave them DNA tests that showed ancient Egyptians were a Semetic race, not a black one. I gave them heiroglyphs that clearly depicted the Egyptians as a very olive-ish tan color, as opposed to darker sub-Saharan Africans. I then told them that even IF Cleo had a drop of Egyptian blood in her (which she probably did not) then she still wouldn’t have been black, as Egyptians are Semetic (Middle Eastern), not black.
Oddly enough, these people seem focused only on Egypt – as though it were the only damn thing in Africa! I tried to tell them about the remarkable cultures of sub-Saharan Africa, and the Empires of Ghana, Mali, and Kanem, not to mention the warrior queens of Zaria, but if it ain’t Egyptian, they don’t care. For all they claim to be so proud of black history, they sure aren’t interested in studying Africa itself.
I have never been banned from a board looks around warily yet, but I voluntarily removed myself from a MB called The Shack. It is a board for gays and maybe lesbians, I met several good friends there but I also tangled with some nasty individuals.What finally did it was when I objected to the posting of under 16 pictures of boys on one members website. As a mother of a very pretty, androgynous boy I felt that his site affliation with Sexhound.com was an inappropriate forum for those pics. Boy did I get fried!
Didnt change my opinion any and the harder I tried to defend myself the uglier it got… finally I said fuck off and reported the lot to Cyberangels.
Back when Deja.com existed (DejaNews was such a clever name, why’d they have to change it?), I had registered under one name and then by mistake I broke one of their draconian rules (you weren’t allowed to post the same message twice on different newsgroups). I forgot I had posted it before and the next thing I knew I was permanently annihilated. I tried e-mailing appeals with abject apologies judgment but they were absolutely merciless and didn’t deign to respond.
So I registered under another name and the same thing happened again. I lost two of my favorite names that way. Then Deja.com was no more. Its replacement, Google Groups, seems to have no such rule. It’s also a lot simpler than Deja.com which was very complex.
Like many other dopers, I have been banned from the Left Behind Message Boards. My user name was “unsaved”, and in my profile I included a link to this web page. Several other people on the boards decided that I was a “hate criminal” based on this information alone. I mainly hung out in creation vs evolution thread, posting long, detailed responses to the various fact-free rants that were presented there. After about a month, I tried logging on and found that I had been banned. All of the threads that I posted to were deleted. I still don’t know exactly which event motivated them to ban me. What’s really odd is that they never kicked me off the email list. I’m still getting adds and such telling me to order my copy of Desecration now. One of the emails also bragged that the LBMB featured “kind reactions to those who believe differently”.
Not banned, per se, but certainly the feeling from the head honcho that I wasn’t welcome. But, then again, I also got my feelings hurt when I just received a mail order catalog called ‘Harriet Carter’ telling me ‘this might be your last catalog!’
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