| So, this is new.
My recent enforced absence from The Classic Battletech Forums
has caused me, through a somewhat tortuous and roundabout path, to have
the idea of creating my own Blog. As the aformentioned ban remains
(pathetically) one of the central issues of my life at this time, I
might as well start by describing how it came about.
ClassicBattletech is a moderated forum, meaning, of course,
that it has a hard-working and dedicated (but completely unpaid) staff
of moderators that enforce the rules. actually, I used to be one of them, but retired some time ago.
Actually, that's not strictly true, that's just what
I tell people. You see, I am, in the words of John Adams, obnoxious and
disliked. I have a tendency of rubbing people the wrong way, especially
online, where my quirky sense of humor lacks the subtle tones of my
voice to prop it up. I'm also somewhat short-tempered, a fact I've been
wrestling with most of my life but managed to get mostly under control.
So, at some point, I left the service of the CBT/Mod
staff. I actually thought I left on somewhat good terms, but I appear
to have been wrong. A minor bungle sometime back got me a not-Warning.
I said to someone that I had "caught him in a lie", which is a somewhat
obscure phrase that I had heard once in my life and believed to mean
that I had caught him trying to pass himself off as knowledgeable in a
subject that he had not researched. The Mod staff accurately determined
that the statement might have been taken to mean that I thought he was
actually lying or a liar, which would have been mean and unfair aside
of simply violating the rules. The post was edited and the matter
forgotten (actually, I forgot it, I am well aware that the moderators have a secret vault where all my past misdeeds are recorded for future use.)
Now, this wasn't an actual Warning, it was a
Friendly Reminder, and was never fully or Officially upgraded to a
Warning. I did get one Warning though. I told incredbil that he has a
reading comprehension problem. Apparently that's insulting, but he
does. He reads things and doesn't understand them. Regardless of why he
does that, it's a reading comprehension problem.
After that, it starts to get a little weird. Up to this point, the
Moderators' actions have been friendly and restrained, but then the
oddest thing happens. In a thread that no longer appears on CBT, for no
reason I can imagine, one of the moderators called me out. Four days
after the last post on the thread, he made a post that was
ostensibly aimed at "calming down" a situation that might have
become a flame-war. Now, you and I (and the moderator in question) know
that flame-wars don't take any four days to get started, and besides he
made some insulting insinuations about me. Naturally, I got a little
torqued off and stupidly, on a public forum, asked him what the hell he
was doing.
Some thirty or forty seconds later, I deleted the post, replacing it
entirely with the word "withdrawn." At that point, the moderator who
started the whole thing banned me for a week.
That was a rather harsh switch from friendly and official Warnings.
Unusually severe treatment following a confrontational post from a
moderator (who, himself, did the banning.) Nevertheless, the Admins
seem to have backed him up.Why, I don't understand. They never saw the
post. It was deleted before it could be moved to the Moderators'
Evidence Locker of Doom.
At this last turn it gets really bizarre. Out of the blue, I am banned
for a month for a supposed violation of rule #2. Now, rule #2 is the
anti-trolling rule. If you're posting just
to be confrontational, it says. And I wasn't. If I wanted to be
confrontational or insulting, I'm much better at that than the
moderators appear to imagine.
Sadly, I can't show you the posts in question because they're no longer
publicly available, having been pre-emptively deleted to keep
their "confrontational" contents from causing a stir. At the
moment, I believe you'll have to take my word for it that I was being
as non-confrontational as I know how, didn't insult anyone, etc. etc.
etc.
So I don't break any rule, and I'm banned for a month. And to compound
the problem, the Admins are all too busy (or on vacation or something)
to address the issue.
So I'm just going to serve out the remaining 11 (or so) days of my ban
and then restrict my posts to RP and articles until I can get this
thing fully hashed out with the Admins. From what I've been getting so
far, it seems rather unlikely I'll ever be treated fairly.
That seems like enough for now, actually.
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