I can’t believe anybody still thinks this has anything to do with a threatened lawsuit. That was almost a month ago. Melin was banned out of spiteful vengence. Melin was deliberately antogonizing Ed and the mods with her sigs, they got pissed off and banned her, using yesterday’s news as an excuse.
I liked it better when you guys just kept silent when you pulled crap like this. It was better than being lied to.
Oh come on, RT. Do you really think that anything that goes on here at the little ol’ SDMB is going to have any effect on Melin out in the real world?
Based on Melin’s own description of events, it appears to me that she over-reacted, and that she is seriously overestimating the impact that anything which appears on this board is going to have with anyone she knows IRL. Somehow, I just don’t see the squabbling that goes on here having any impact at all on Melin’s career. Seems to me she was exaggerating that possible impact to try to achieve a desired result with the administrators (i.e., to try to cow them into an apology/retraction). Just my humble opinion.
StoryTyler:
To me, her comment semed designed to draw a parallel between you’re guarded behavior due to fear of being banned and the SDMB administration’s guarded behavior for fear of being sued.
If anything, this episode should have demonstrated to everyone the danger in making strong assumptions based upon slight information.
The best lack all conviction
The worst are full of passionate intensity.
*
Ursa wrote:
I think the unspoken concern (or at least not-clearly-spoken concern) is that if a demonstrably litigious poster remains, the administrators will have to watch every step they take, for fear of future litigation. The lawsuit which had been threatened previously put them on notice that they were dealing with someone who is ready to sue (or at least threaten to sue) at the drop of a hat.
Now add to that the (perceived or real) possibility that the litigious poster might be trying to provoke the administrators into posting something that would give her grounds for a lawsuit. (I don’t say that this is what was happening – only that it might be perceived to be the case.) Would you want to continue in that environment?
Not that anyone cares, but…My Spin On The Whole Mess:
From Zotti’s message, and from the timeline of events, it’s pretty clear to me that the decision to ban Melin was prompted NOT by the lawsuit ‘threat’ but by her sigline and by bad blood between her and the admins. If the ‘threat’ was the real reason, Melin would have been banned immediately afterwards, not a month later.
While Ed has every right to ban whoever he wishes, for any reason or no reason at all, it’s ridiculous to air one’s pettiness and expect the rest of us to nod and move on. Sure, you can take your ball and go home, but that doesn’t mean we’ll play with you any more. Personally, I’ve bought my last Straight Dope book. Any thoughts I’ve entertained in the past of checking out the Reader are no more.
I’ve mulled over whether to ditch the MB myself, but I’m the most mundane, pointless poster around, so y’all wouldn’t even notice. Furthermore, you get neither benefit nor detriment from my being here, so I might as well stay as go.
If, however, you decide to communicate with me about this post, you’ll prove your pettiness to everyone here and bring your true motives into question.
Am I baiting you? You betcha. This is the Pit, after all. Neutral moderators and administrators, my ass. I have a new sigline for the foreseeable future.
Definitely NOT voted Best Moderator, so please don’t ban me, Mr. Message Board Poobah, Sir!
“Gate” is not a suffix for “scandal”, despite what the media has done with it. Nixon’s pals broke into a hotel called The Watergate Hotel. Hence, the Watergate Scandal.
If they had broken into the “Grand Ball Hotel,” do you think we would currently be suffering through Melinball II? I would hope so.
Ed:
That’s all for me, I think. If you don’t believe his statement, that’s your prerogative, but I thought perhaps you had forgotten or misremebered it.
Not anymore, since Ed posted to say that the accusations directed at her weren’t true.
She said so herself. And?
OTOH, the sort of people one might want to work for, if one values integrity, might be decidedly less inclined to consider you if they hear you’ve been nosing around in places where you shouldn’t have been.
mic.facts.straight.dope may seem like a pretty obscure place to be slandered, but realistically, no place is obscure anymore. If you say something online, or if something’s said about you, it may still be around for a long time to come. And people are getting increasingly creative in searching and packaging all that stuff.
But more directly, Melin noted that people who know her professionally also post to MFSD, and know her screen name.
Was this bit of slander more likely than not to have affected her, professionally? No. But was it enough of a longshot to make it totally implausible? Hardly.
That’s my humble opinion, anyway.
I can see I’m going to have to explain this in numbing detail. Let’s take it from the top.
(1) The original incident arose from a misunderstanding. When the SDMB was down due to the hacker, Melin posted a status report on misc.facts.straight-dope. She based this in part on a friendly conversation she had with me via IM. (I mention this lest you think I’ve been seething with hatred of Melin all this time.) Some SDMB mods and others felt Melin was acting as though she were still on staff, and a flame war erupted. One of the charges tossed around was that Melin had visited an SD staff site without authorization. In fact Melin had been invited to the site by another SDMB administrator, unbeknownst to the others.
Asterbark, who was not on staff and whom most of us had never heard of, wandered into the middle of this and posted a comment to the effect that Melin’s visit to the staff site showed she was untrustworthy. Melin, it’s safe to say, was outraged by Asterbark’s charge (which, let me emphasize, was not true). She concluded that I had sent out a staff memo about her and that someone had leaked this to Asterbark–that, in effect, we had put Asterbark up to it.
Melin was mistaken about this. I had written no memo. Asterbark had jumped to conclusions based on posts she had read on MFSD.
Melin wrote a long letter to me and Asterbark threatening a lawsuit if she didn’t receive a public apology, posted by a certain time, that she could read and approve ahead of time. Melin’s letter has now been posted on Opal’s site. You’re welcome to read it at http://fathom.org/cgi-bin/sdmb.pl?read=1288. It’s a remarkable piece of work. I’m convinced she was deadly serious.
(2) When we got Melin’s threat we were concerned, to say the least. Melin’s a lawyer and seemed perfectly capable of following through on her threat. Her rationale for including us in the suit was ludicrous, but that didn’t matter. It would cost us a lot of money–$5,000 was the figure mentioned here–to get it thrown out. My bosses, after muttering about the SDMB being more trouble than it was worth, told me to do what I had to do to get Melin to back off. I wrote her a letter explaining the facts. She wrote back saying she was dropping her demands with respect to the Chicago Reader (which owns the Straight Dope site). I then mediated a public apology by Asterbark on MFSD, and posted an explanation of my own there. I did this partly because I felt sorry for Asterbark, who was naive and frightened, but also because I wanted the matter resolved and all lawsuit threats dropped, lest we be drawn in at a later time. Eventually this came to pass.
(3) Next we faced the question of what to do about Melin from there on out. I argued that we should ban her immediately. I felt it was only a matter of time before another incident occurred and she threatened another lawsuit. But I was overruled by my bosses, who felt the SDMB rules were insufficiently clear about our right to ban people. I was told to (a) rewrite the rules to clarify that we reserved the right to exclude anyone at any time; (b) “don’t ban Melin but explain to her in a private communication that we cannot abide the absurd possibility of being sued for having welcomed her as a guest on our boards, and that we reserve the right to ban her in the future for any reason whatsoever;” and © next time, give her the hook. (This was more colorfully phrased in the original.) I did as instructed, adding at the end of my note to Melin, “We expect you to cooperate with the board moderators and administrators and to desist from making life difficult for us in any way.”
(4) A short time later Melin began using the boldface sig line, “Voted Best Moderator,” later changed to"Voted Best Moderator - Emeritus." This drove the real moderators up the wall. For users who didn’t know what “emeritus” meant, it falsely suggested she was a moderator, and for those who did, it falsely suggested she had “retired” and was using this as an honorary title, when in fact she had left her moderator position involuntarily. (For the record, she got into a public dispute with another moderator and kept arguing after I ordered her to stop, so I fired her.) In any case, the sig was irritating and misleading to users, and I wrote Melin a note asking her to drop it. She promptly changed her sig line to, “Sig line CENSORED.”
It was the last straw. I was fed up. She was impossible, constantly played the martyr, always had to get in a dig. It was clear to me that she’d never let up, another flame war would erupt, she’d threaten to sue again, blah blah blah. So I banned her. Delaying would just have prolonged the inevitable. The proximate cause of her getting banned was the sig line. A minor matter? In itself, yeah. But it shows the attitude we were dealing with. Make no mistake, the primary reason was the lawsuit threat, and anyone who thinks that was minor has never been on the receiving end of one.
I know a lot of people want us all to kiss and make up. Sorry, not possible. We can’t afford the risk. You can’t operate a business with a customer who threatens you with lawsuits, fights constantly with your staff, and thinks she’s helping you run the place. Please understand that the SDMB sucks up a lot of resources - my time (yeah, I get paid for this), the tech staff’s time, a couple hardware upgrades, etc. Every time we see all the bitching and moaning by people who obviously have no idea they’re guests here, it makes us - and in particular my bosses - wonder why we’re knocking ourselves out for a bunch of ingrates. The longer Melin stuck around and stirred up trouble, the more it hastened the day when my bosses decided to hell with this.
Melin is better off on a Usenet newsgroup, where anything goes. Those who still think she was wronged after reading this are invited to join her there. But she’s not coming back into this restaurant ever again.
Kim, you said:
yes, I do understand that, thank you for clarifying. I guess to me, causing another pain is very rarely worth it, but I understand your destinction and I can not argue with it. Ed has now spoken definitively, and I would now propose that we all drop it. Fun is fun and done is done, to keep this up has, as I see it, zero potential for any positive results for anyone. Only my $.02.
Peace!
Cecil said it. I believe it. That settles it.
Y’know, Ed, a lot of us are outgrates; be sure to tell your bosses that.
Jodi
Fiat Justitia
I’m still stewing here about my name being taken in vain, so I got one more thing to say, then I’m going back to my forum.
StoryTyler,
Hey, if you’re gonna share your interpretation and reaction to my email, then for sheesh-sake, copy my email here so others can make up their own minds about whether it was “bitchy,” “childish,” or a “dig.” I copied it above in an earlier post.
I really don’t want to aggravate anybody here because - selfishly - I don’t want to be another target of wrath and I badly want this all to die. Some of you understand the position the staff is in here. Others see us as censors who pick on members unfairly at best and ban people for piddly reasons at worst. Meanwhile I’m getting ulcers here censoring myself and trying to rise above it, reading messages that misrepresent events, mischaracterize us and even obscenely insult me and my friends.
I responded via email to StoryTyler, as I said, to try to avoid being targeted for public bashing. I think my point was reasonable and didn’t deserve any of the adjectives she applied to it. I wasn’t trying to be sneaky or backhanded in sending email to a member. Man, did that backfire.
Being threatened by a lawsuit could change the whole flavor of the board and end up doing much to censor all of us. It hinders our freedom of speech when we have to worry about this kind of thing, and I think it’s a damn shame.
Jill
I’m really trying not to take sides here, but if “censorship” would prevent a staffer from referring to a poster as a “poseur” without really knowing what she’s talking about, I say let’s have a little of that.
Jodi
Fiat Justitia
So I guess my question on the other thread is answered. Melin is telling the truth, she’s not lying, and Ed doesn’t care. She can be subjected to abuse by moderators and administrators, she can try to defend herself with a post, she can write to an administrator with the true facts, and they can ignore her and let her be slandered based on a false impression they gave, and when she finally figures that she’s not going to get any help from them unless she forces them to it, she does overreact some but does finally do what she has to do to get some attention.
So Mr. Zotti, sir, if TUBADIVA ignored Melin’s email to her about what the truth was, even when the other post was made, what would you have done if Melin had sent you a nice note with the same truth in it, without any threats of a lawsuit and with a “pretty please” would you post something to show that she was not doing those things she was accused of? Given what seems to be the bad feeling between the two of you, and that you have your mods and admins to protect, would you have done anything to set the record straight if she hadn’t threatened to sue you? Or would you have just ignored her the way that TUBADIVA apparently did?
I think that everybody here screwed up. CKDextHavn did, I guess, by not telling Mr. Zotti or TUBADIVA that Melin was working on something for him, TUBADIVA did by making her post and then not doing anything about it when it was misinterpreted by someone else, Melin did by not at least trying to say “pretty please” to Mr. Zotti once, just to see if it would work, and Mr. Zotti has done so by banning Melin for the crime of, apparently, being more popular than the official staff. I wouldn’t have voted for her if I’d known it was going to get her banned.
I still think all of you should kiss and make up. Banning Melin is too extreme. Suspend her for a month if you want, and tell her she can’t have ANY sig line anymore if it makes you feel better, but don’t cut her out completely. Sheesh, am I the only person who’s ever emailed her a question about a legal thing and had her answer it back right away with some help?
You let Contestant #3 come back. Let Melin come back too, if she apologizes and says she’ll never do it again.
Goldie
Gentlemen certainly DO prefer blondes –
and with good reason!
That was truly gold.
Well said 24K, cmon guys…please?
Bring some sanity back, do something right, something we can all refer to in years to come with pride and say: I wa there when all these people came to their senses, admitted a mistake, and rectified it.
It wont lessen you by admitting you went to far… quite the contrary! Anyone who can publicly admit an error, well they are all the bigger in my book.
C’mon, Ed…please! You went to far. This is so ugly and so divisive…please?
Ah yes. Nevermind that I RUN A WEB HOSTING COMPANY. I also design websites. I also run a couple of rather high traffic sites, and I know a lot of people who also run high traffic sites. The message board should not be that big a drain on funds. I know high traffic sites that serve thousands of full color pictures (naked ones, with lots of traffic) and streaming video and audio and so on, that are a LOT higher traffic than this site would be, and many of them have hosting costs around $50-100/month. If the SDMB requires enough system administration to add any significant cost to the running of it, then it isn’t set up properly. A message board script should be relatively maintenance freen on the server end. We already know the moderators are volunteers. So…? Either the board isn’t costing them much or they’re getting ripped off somewhere. That isn’t neccessarily fact, but it’s my opinion, based on 5 years of intimate web experience.
–
From an actual catalog: “Disco balls create an enchanting, dazzling effect of light shafts, adding movement and glamour to any occasion”
the Abrams’ bris was certainly memorable
O p a l C a t
www.opalcat.com
Wow, you haven’t read anything that has been posted so far, have you? WE KNOW AND ACCEPT THAT IT IS THEIR RIGHT. We are just questioning whether they should have done it, not whether they had the right to do it. What makes this thread any different from any other? We voice our opinions and outrage all over the board.
–
From an actual catalog: “Disco balls create an enchanting, dazzling effect of light shafts, adding movement and glamour to any occasion”
the Abrams’ bris was certainly memorable
O p a l C a t
www.opalcat.com
–
From an actual catalog: “Disco balls create an enchanting, dazzling effect of light shafts, adding movement and glamour to any occasion”
the Abrams’ bris was certainly memorable
O p a l C a t
www.opalcat.com
–
From an actual catalog: “Disco balls create an enchanting, dazzling effect of light shafts, adding movement and glamour to any occasion”
the Abrams’ bris was certainly memorable
O p a l C a t
www.opalcat.com
I wouldn’t know, as I have my server set to reject mail from her due to past events.
–
From an actual catalog: “Disco balls create an enchanting, dazzling effect of light shafts, adding movement and glamour to any occasion”
the Abrams’ bris was certainly memorable
O p a l C a t
www.opalcat.com