I used to post on a popular viddeo gaming board (still in operation) back in the early 00’s.
Somebody on the current events subforum wanted a Friedrich Nietzsche book recommendation and I listed a few of his books including the book “The Gay Science”. At the time the website 100% forbid anything using the word gay in any topic unless it was solely about gay rights or positive portrayals of homosexuality (since at the time gay was still being used commonly on the internet as a synonym for “Dumb” or “Bad”) so my post was deleted and I got a 3 karma loss and mod notice for inappropriately using the word.
I also was a member of a forum that allowed users to automatically put banner pics at the bottom of their posts. There was something like a 500 pixel height limit but there wasn’t any hard checks to deny you if it was bigger so I used a banner image that was 510 pixels high because I didn’t want to mess with the aspect ratio of the image.
I had this sig for an entire year with no complaints at all until one day I suddenly got suspended for a week because apparently some mod finally noticed it was above the limit, so instead of simply PMing me to kindly edit it down they decided a hard suspension was in order. They also made a front page announcement that mods were now cracking down on banner pics and specifically named and shamed me over it. Never went back after that.
Not uncommon on Reddit. Recently, I said “I really wish you guys would not assume that posters are stupid.” That’s it. This did not violate any of the posted rules. But the mod banned me. The reason given was “lol, bye.” Upon asking what had happened, the mod replied in a way that indicated they had lost their ability to capitalize and punctuate, unlike their other posts. It also didn’t make a whole lot of sense. They honestly came off as quite deranged. (It was full of laughing and calling me a bitch.)
I honestly suspect they were inebriated and wanted the power trip. The subreddit wasn’t anything special, so I left one final reply, and just blocked the mod. And, on Reddit, blocking a poster means they also don’t see what you have to say, either.
In my previous post, I assume that just saying “on Reddit” is acceptable, because Reddit is really just a platform of subreddits–i.e. separate boards. My mentioning Reddit leaves you no closer to figuring out which subreddit I was talking about.
Also note that my previous comment is limited to what I consider “coming out of nowhere.” There are a few other places where I believe I’ve been unfairly moderated, but the moderation didn’t come out of nowhere.
Though I do admit there is one place recently where they banned without any indication that this was a possibility. I am still working through my anger on that one, as it was a place where I’d let my guard down and thought I’d made actual online friends.
One really good thing about the modding here is that, except in the worst cases, you are never banned without first being told that what you are doing could lead to a banning.
I got suspended a bit back on an art site with a forum for asking why explicit Nazi imagery (against the AUP of the site) was permitted by one specific user when other instances of similar art were taken down.
Turns out that
a) The artist is a friend of the site owner
b) the mod handling my suspension is himself a neo Nazi
c) the artist brings in a ton of revenue via pageclicks from their followers
I was a moderator on an active board. The technically incompetent administrators (mother and son) “upgraded” to vBulletin5 - which is a POS - without telling anyone. So we all woke up to a completely wonky, unusable message board. The moderators, who had not been told of the upgrade in advance, quickly disavowed any knowledge or responsibility for the various snafus.
At first all the members tried to complain politely, but the admins went radio silent for 2 weeks! So the complaints got progressively more heated.
Finally the board owner posted an insipid “yeah, some bugs, don’t worry we’ll fix it” message in the mod channel, not visible to members. At that point we mods joined in with the heavy-duty complaining. Finally, the admin who had done the switch showed up and said, “oh, I was traveling on business and I was too busy to check the board. I do have a life, you know.”
When the mods pointed out that he should have been checking his email even if he was on a business trip, and if he was too busy at work to fix bugs it was a piss-poor time to launch a poorly implemented upgrade, all of the mods got banned - BUT our titles were switched to “member.” So it looked like we were still able to post, except we were not. It seems our accounts were hijacked - the admins went in and changed our passwords so that we could no longer log in. Then the admins accused us of “sabotaging” the site.
Eventually they did put “banned” under the names of all the mods.
So we went and started a new message board. All the active members except for one came with us. The old board is pretty dead. Ours is doing fine. Justice is served.
Huh, I was banned there too, on my first offense after over a year of posting, for a post I made in a lighthearted mood. I admit that it’s possible that whatever I wrote, which I can’t remember now, could be misconstrued, but the funny thing is, one mod warned me and another banned me not a day later.
On a cannabis forum where people often posted pictures of their grows, I would check newbie pictures to make sure they had their EXIF data stripped. One newbie posted pictures of a large grow, and the EXIF data was all there. I suggested he deal with it and he told me I was full of shit. I replied with the location where the picture was taken. He screamed, “NARC” and a mod suspended me. I left for good.
Years ago before I knew better, I got embroiled in an ongoing thread on vaccination on a (then) popular alt med website.
Although clearly unacceptable by website anti-flaming rules, I was repeatedly targeted by nasty personal attacks from antivaxers (the worst coming from a poster who was sort of board royalty and had his own forum where he could sell glop to the gullible). I responded civilly for quite awhile, then finally posted in moderately snarky fashion and was promptly banished by a moderator to a sort of board Siberia where almost no one ventured.
I never bothered to return. Eventually the website was decimated by trends in social media and now is a lightly trafficked wasteland.
I remember this happening all the time during the halcyon days of Yahoo Groups. The temptation to boot anyone who annoyed you was too much for many group administrators to resist; they’d ban people over the silliest, most picayune stuff imaginable.
I remember a Raymond Chandler discussion group on Yahoo that imploded over the issue of whether or not Philip Marlowe was a “timeless” character. The group owner simply banned anyone who disagreed with him. I’ve long since forgotten which side of the argument he was on.
