I know that some other folks over here occasionally still visit the LBMB, so I thought I’d let you know how the place has, if you’ll forgive the pun, gone to hell of late.
(For the uninitiated–the LBMB is the Left Behind Message Board, a board for fans of the popular Left Behind series of books that deal with life after the rapture. It tends to draw in the very fundiest of Fundies, but you can usually find a pretty good range of Christian opinion there. There was a much-ballyhooed altercation between members of this board and that one a few months ago, and a few of us stuck around when the dust settled.)
First of all, a few weeks back, there was a poster named Tibeten Shepherd who was a rather obnoxious troll. Many e-mails were placed to the Admin of the board (a faceless entity creatively named “Admin”), to no avail. TS was never banned, and indeed posted again just a day or two ago. Everyone chalked it up to absentee landlord.
Not too long thereafter, strange things started happening. Ghoti, one of the more well-respected posters on the board, was inexplicably banned, and requests to Admin for an explanation went unanswered. Then, another poster tried to start a thread about marital intimacy (nothing shocking, even by their standards) and the thread was locked without explanation. Later, a thread about abortion (not unlike a million others that had gone through there) was also locked. (There were other incidents, but I’ve really only caught most of it second-hand.)
Requests to Admin for an explanation for any of this were first ignored, and then were locked and deleted. More recently, any thread that was the least bit critical of Admin’s actions was locked and deleted. Still yet, Admin is nothing more than an anonymous username that has never interacted with anyone. (It finally started placing a cheesy form letter at the end of each of the closed threads, which really only made things worse.)
(It should be noted that tensions on the board were high anyway, as most of the discussion in the last month or so has been Catholics vs. Protestants, with some posters bent on tearing down the Catholic Church and not caring to hurt feelings along the way.)
Some of the “board elders” created rival boards, and many of the regulars flocked to them. Others resorted to civil disobedience, such as copying closed anti-Admin threads and posting them in another thread, continuing the discussion until Admin closed the new thread and the process repeated. All anyone really wants is for Admin to come out from behind the curtain and to get over him/her/itself, but it appears that it isn’t going to happen.
I am telling the story here for two reasons–first of all, I wanted the occasional LBMB lurkers over here to know what was going down. It’s really unfortunate, since it used to be a good place to hear opinions that totally differed from mine, even if they didn’t tend to be very tolerant of non-believers.
Also, I wanted to say how great it is to have moderators who are also active and respected members of the community. After seeing the result of anonymous and robotic administration over there, I think we take this aspect of the SDMB for granted. You folks do a great job, and we can’t thank you enough.
Dr. J
