You’re right. I was wrong to suggest it in that format.
LIBERAL –
Hey, I asked first.
Twisty, my man, you are missing the point. Yes, he mooched. End of Scene One.
Begin Scene Two. Then he was made aware of the error of his ways that night, and given ample opportunity to say,
I guaran-damn-tee Billdo would not have made that post if any sort of decent reply had come out of that night.
Clearly you missed the posts stating that he received at least two emails confronting him about his behavior and never responded. It was hardly a case of everybody talking about him behind his back and him not knowing about it. He had a chance to make things right and he didn’t. I think that says a lot about his character.
Which is fair enough. But noone is being asked to give him money. Noone is being asked to give him a job. All Tuba was looking for was pointers to these things.
IMO, He should try to go back to his family first. Or at least try and make his case himself. Or apologise to everyone he’s offended previously.
Or, preferably, all three.
Preeeeee-cisely.
But, as has been said in this thread and others, Dopers tend to be a generous lot. It’s very easy to send someone money, etc. through Pay-Pal. Given the urgent tone (justified) in Tuba’s post, I could easily see someone sending money. It’s also not clear if whatshisname has a plane ticket back. I’ve seen a bunch of threads that started out as a “Please send prayers/good vibes/happy thoughts” thing and turned into fund-raising drives, or the person who needs good vibes posting later saying “I got money/stuff from all these generous dopers”. Look at Tuba’s thread-Vanilla mentioned that she’d posted that she was going to have a hard Christmas and that Dopers, unasked, sent toys for her kids.
I think it important to let all the facts be known.
We fully agree on this part, though! 
Yeah, but I stated my point first. 
No, I wouldn’t. His choices were not limited to posting a thank you or not posting at all. He could have also said to TubaDiva that he appreciated the sentiment, but he did not feel he was in a position to ask for help from Dopers. That would have been classy, IMO, and it would have covered all bases. Plus, he would have come out looking much, much better than he does now, because those who weren’t directly involved in the earlier incident (and who would therefore be on the fence) would have been more likely to sympathize with him.
I don’t think the former thread was shut down because it suddenly became known that a Doper was involved. I think it was shut down because it’d run its course, as these things often do. (I Can’t find it at the moment, though, so I might be wrong.) As for the latter thread, as Ginger pointed out, the Doper WAS named. That’s why it was closed.
Are you saying that Billdo gets special treatment, then? If not, then what he did is allowed, by virtue of the fact that the thread was never closed.
Now, since we’ve established that at least one of your two examples is incorrect, do you have any evidence that a thread that is about Dopers’ offline behavior but that does not name anyone - or, perhaps, even refer to this board - is verboten?
I can’t believe that nobody has noticed how kind Billdo was being with his thread on the mooching of beers and dinner. He EASILY could have named names, but he didn’t, most likely because he didn’t want to burn any of MM’s bridges for him. He was venting because he was pissed, true, but at the same time he went to great pains not to name names so that MM could see the thread, respond to the private emails he recieved and make amends without harming his reputation here on the boards. Those of you suggesting that Billdo’s pit thread was out of line are completely overlooking how much care Billdo took at the time NOT to drag MM’s name through the mud. Frankly, I commend Bill for it, I’m not sure I would have been as restrained and polite in the same situation.
The fact that MM had emails, threads and all and did nothing to respond to them or make amends is I am sure what prompted Bill to post as he did. From Bill’s POV, here’s a person who fucked over the generosity of dopers, never apologised for it and is now asking for generosity again. Fool me once…
…not to mention that by posting the Pit thread the way he did, Billdo essentially pre-empted the need for any of the other affected parties to start a Pit thread of his or her own, and possibly doing so in a less tactful and more revealing manner.
You actually make my point for me by reminding me that one of those threads did mention the doper Pitee by screen name, which is what caused it to be shut down. The other seems to be missing from the database, so I can’t verify it one way or the other, but if you want to exclude it from consideration because I can’t show how it supports my contention, that’s fine. However, you seem to have my contention incorrect – I’m not saying anonymous pittings are disallowed because they’re annonymous. I’m saying that pitting Dopers for RL encounters is verboten here. From my recollection, when it comes out that the thread is about RL Doper interactions, it’s shut down, whether that’s made clear up front in the OP or is discovered at a later time. All I need to do is point you to Lynn’s post in the thread we can find, where she said (bolding mine):
Billdo didn’t get special treatment because no one knew at the time his thread was posted and ran its course that it was about a RL Doper encounter. Closing it now on that basis would be moot, since it’s a dead thread anyway. But posting it in the first place goes against every admonition I’ve ever seen on these boards about bringing RL issues between Dopers to the boards – that’s all I’m saying.
and also to Geo. No, I did not miss these.
- He acted in a way which pissed off his companions at the time.
- Said companions chose (for whatever reasons, perhaps very well thought out ones) to not confront him w/it at the time.
- He spent what he would have perceived as ‘good evening w/friends’
4 Some time later (I don’t know the time frame, doesn’t really matter to me) he gets emails from some of those gathered indicating that he was wrong about the evening that people were pissed off at him. - He chose to not respond to these (we don’t know the reason for that, could be he’s simply a jerk, could be he was acutely embarassed, could be he didn’t read the emails, whatever).
at that point - you’ve already given him the informatin “Hey, dude you pissed us off”. so, what again is the point of that original thread? Certainly not to ‘let him know’ that’s already been done. Pitting another doper on the board for events that happened in real life is against the rules (as pointed out by the Lynn quote).
The fact that it was done in a blind way allowed him to thwart the rules here. Since people had already addressed him personally about his bad behavior via email, obviously the effort wasn’t done to ‘inform’ him of folks’ opinion of his actions. What’s left except the obvious public trashing of him in a place and way so that he knew exactly what was being done, as did all the other participants at the fest, and their friends/whoever they told.
the only ones to whom that was a ‘blind’ item were the Administration who would have, no doubt, enforced the rule about ‘keep IRL issues off the boards’ and the other dopers who posted to that thread who were given less than the whole truth about the scene (ironic, isn’t it, since that was one complaint re: the Tuba thread).
Bottom line - I am not attempting to claim that MM was anything wondeful /pleasant/non guilty here. And, lest I get yet another “gosh, all he did was not give the guys name,Bildo was being nice”. had he given the name, the thread would have been closed. not giving the name allowed one and all from the gig complain about a real life encounter w/another Doper, something normally not done.
Your comparison isn’t apt at all. Billdo’s thread did not mention anyone by name. That thread did. The latter thread was closed, and Billdo’s was not. The fact that he mentioned the name later is completely irrelevant.
You mentioned that Billdo “got away with it.” He didn’t get away with a blessed thing. He did absolutely nothing wrong. You seem to think he did.
Think about this for a moment. Billdo did NOT pit a Doper for a RL encounter. He pitted someone who was with him and his friends. Again, the fact that he mentioned this later is completely irrelevant to the issue at hand. The fact of the matter is that he didn’t mention any real details in that thread. Again, the thread to which you’ve linked isn’t comparable with Billdo’s thread, not in the least.
You said he got away with it. To what do you refer, then?
Yes, we’ve been told not to bring RL issues between Dopers to the boards. Once again, that’s not what Billdo did, and I fail to see how his thread could be construed as even remotely inappropriate.
That is what Billdo did. That is exactly what he did. He and a few other people from the boards met up IRL. They had a RL encounter and as a result of that encounter there was an “issue” between them. Billdo brought it to the board then, when he posted about the incident and he brought it back to the board now, when he finally named names. Just because he “got away with” bringing a RL incident to the boards by disguising it without referencing who it was with, doesn’t mean he didn’t bring it to the boards. I’m completely stumped as to how you can’t see that. But now we’re just going around and around and around and getting nowhere, so I’ll bow out at this juncture. I’ve said what I have to say on the issue and there’s really nothing further I can say that won’t be simply repeating myself. I think what he did was wrong, you think what he did was noble. I can see aspects of your opinion, I just differ on how he went about it. Other than that, we’ll just have to agree to disagree, I guess.
w/a/d/r and all. The ‘friend’ he was with was a doper, the encounter was a dopefest, other people at said dopefest posted w/o mentioning the guys name, the fact that it was a dopefest etc etc etc. How on earth can you insist that it ‘wasn’t pitting a doper about a real life encounter’. this was done expressly for the purpose of bringing this encounter to the board to comment on without mentioning the “immaterial” fact that it was a doper. Didn’t they state that they told said doper this thread existed and it was (obviously ) about him?
the only people who didn’t know that it was a blind pitting of another doper were the admins/mods was, and other unsuspecting dopers. All of the participants knew bloody well who it was about.
think about it dan - there’s been some real stories about events at some dopefests - do you really think we’d be better off w/folks posting ‘blind’ rants about someone’s behavior at them? Or in chat, on other boards etc.
See, your problem is you’re trying to make him retroactively wrong, and that’s utter horseshit. He did not name names. He did NOT mention it was Dope-related. Even if we assume doing so isn’t allowed, he did nothing wrong. Why is it so tough for you to figure this out?
You can’t sit there and point a finger at Billdo NOW and say, “Ah, ah, ah… you named names! That other thread is clearly wrong.” Bullshit. If it wasn’t wrong then, it’s not wrong now. Was it closed? No. Was he chastised when he opened it? No. Oh, okay… was he chastised for it when he named names in the MPSIMS thread? He wasn’t?
Then how can you say he did anything wrong?
The facts of the matter are that a) his original Pit thread was undeniably allowable, since it neither named names not alluded to being Doper-related; b) his naming of names in the recent MPSIMS thread was undeniably allowable, because it was not in a thread that he created himself. Those threads are locked. If Billdo yesterday had begun a thread that said, “The MPSIMS thread about MonkeyMule is misleading. He is the person I was referring to in my earlier Pit thread,” then that thread certainly would have been closed, perhaps even deleted.
What Billdo did was raise an objection to that MPSIMS thread on the grounds of his own personal experience with MM. He felt it might be in the best interest of everyone if they knew that other Dopers had been taken advantage of by MM in the past.
First, what they emailed to him really is completely irrelevant. We’re talking about what’s allowed on the board.
Second, Billdo’s OP never mentioned that it was a dope gathering and never mentioned that the person was a doper. Such information is also completely irrelevant. The point of the thread, it seemed to me, was to rant about someone to took advantage of other people in his party.
By “participants,” do you mean those who were in the thread? So what? That’s how many people, wring?
Either way, this is about what’s not allowed on the boards. His OP was not against any rules.
Do I really? Absolutely, unquestionably, yes. Blind rants that don’t name names? Why wouldn’t that be better than someone slamming someone by name? With a blind rant, one can focus on the behavior of the individual without being burdened by their preconceived notions of that person.
“did he pit another doper about an encounter IRL?” Yes.
“is that action against the rules?” Yes.
“were the mods/admins aware that the pit thread was about another doper/rl encounter?” apparently not.
“did they close it at the time?” No, see above.
“would they have closed it had they known?” all evidence I"ve seen says yes. I’ve seen threads (don’t remember enough about 'em to find 'em now) where one doper pitted ‘someone’ about a RL encounter, the other doper comes in guns ablazing, and the thread gets closed immediately.
by participants, I mean there were others at the fest who posted to that thread, saying “I was there, too”. So, several dopers got to trash another doper about a RL encounter.
You really want that shit to happen? Seems to me the admins really don’t. I recall several really ugly personal break ups between dopers where they sniped at each other (I’m sorry, sniped at “Somebody I know IRL”) and the threads got mega ugly. and closed.
The reason I mentioned the emails was to dispel the claim that the pit thread was for the purpose of allowing MM to know folks were pissed at him for his behavior. He had already been informed. See the comments below where folks say “gee, wring, did you miss the fact that we emailed him”?
we really disagree on this.
I really would appreciate a specific ruling from mods:
is it permissable to pit a fellow doper about events that happened off the board, as long as we don’t name the doper involved?
[QUOTE=wring]
"did he pit another doper about an encounter IRL?" No, he didn’t. He pitted someone. In another thread, much much later, he named the name. Not the same as pitting a doper at all.
"is that action against the rules?" Nope.
"would they have closed it had they known?" they may have. They didn’t. Moot point.
**by participants, I mean there were others at the fest who posted to that thread, saying “I was there, too”. So, several dopers got to trash another doper about a RL encounter. ** Doesn’t matter what other people did in that thread; obviously, it wasn’t closed. So either it wasn’t noticed by moderators, or it was and no one deemed it lockable. And again, Billdo’s OP didn’t trash anyone by name, anyway.
And what’s that have to do with Billdo’s thread? If MM had come into that thread and started sniping with Billdo, the comparison you make would make sense. At no point in the entire thread does MM’s name pop up. Not once. Therefore people weren’t talking about him by name, and he didn’t come in to refute Billdo.
No, we don’t. I thought I said earlier that the purpose of the thread was for Billdo to rant in general - not one aimed squarely AT someone. It’s along the same lines of ranting about your boss. You know his name, but your rant is a more general “My boss sucks” rant. Billdo’s was a more general “Hey, people who mooch off others! You suck!” rant.