I believe that this quote here has exactly captured the general sentiment. Substitute for “you guys” as appropriate.
The rest of your post, plus ungood at capturing the general sentiment.
Admittedly, my ban was mild by comparison (one day), so maybe I have nothing to complain about, but…
My ban was for pointing out exactly this. In a Regulars-only “Look, guys, this needs attention” topic. In such a way as to make it clear that I was (rightly, it seems) worried about being banned for bringing it up. Before any warnings were issued.
Now, maybe whoever banned me thought that this was a humorous way to deal with my humorous, roundabout way of expressing my concern. If so, I’m not laughing.
I have seen this in action on a forum for my high school friends I was co-admin of which in some form started almost 19 years ago. The other admins abused their privilege to prank someone without admin privileges, and so I turned it around on one of the admins by doing almost the same thing back. IRL that admin was a ringleader of the social group–tall, born wealthy, charismatic and all of a sudden it was a bridge too far. That got my admin rights taken away. I took them back a few days later, and removed the rest of theirs temporarily just to give them something to mull over if they wanted to try that again down the line. Fast forward a few years, and I volunteered to run the forum myself on my own hardware, on my own internet (and eventually in my own cloud service I was paying out of pocket for), and that lasted 9 years or so before the dwindling forum dwellers voted and decided they wanted to continue in a google hangout.
In 9 years, I think the worst thing I ever did as super admin was edit some posts that were created to wreak havoc (one guy figured out how to DOS attack because the emoji rendering was really slow in the forum), and removed a word replacement which was causing too much confusion. The admins in question which I had the kerfuffle with first abused their rights on Month 3 of the existence of the forum. My kerfuffle was in year 5. I’m sure there was more in between there, but it’s lost to antiquity. Year 5 onward, mostly people behaved if they had admin rights (but when I ran it, I always kept them at a custom role called, ‘demiadmin’ so they could feel important but not get into the really important settings like the database connection).
I never had root admin access on the forum I administered for four years. On April 1st last year, I set up a usergroup named Banned - one that did not affect the users’ permissions whatsoever. And then I moved a single user there, who had not been around in quite some time. And then the (absentee) root got wind of it, and I got banned for realzies. Jokes on him though, I have ownership of the domain name that forum is using! Not that I’ll ever redirect it or anything like that. It’s just… funny.
That is clearly spelled out in the guidelines. They have the absolute authority to do as they choose; the question is who is willing to talk about it when it’s unfair?
You’d be surprised. I am a member of a few more small communities for local fishing groups. Standing up a PHPBB instance is still quite popular for small special interest forums. (And when I say small, I mean on the order of thousands of users)
When I get my hands on a lot of money / spare 64-bit hardware, I may do just that. Wot do you folks think of Flarum (https://flarum.org/), given its similar look and feel?
It would be nice if “friends” was an accurate adjective here, but I don’t think it is.
Some people obviously look at the BBS and see a community; friends, and in some rare cases, family. I count myself among that number.
But others appear to look at it as more trouble than it’s worth, it’s value only measured in clicks and ad revenue… and that’s sad because it really is so much more than that, despite the origin of how & why the forum got started.
I don’t understand why @Modusoperandi would inspire such solidarity. It was a goofy one note joke account. The joke was decent most of the time, but… because that single joke account got suspended, it’s time to throw yourself on the sword? I… don’t get it.
On the now defunct site I came from, we had a master benign trolley; DiskoPickle.
He used Bob Dobbs as his avatar, and every comment he made was 100% over the top hyperbole, making a mockery of extremist and inhumane views… and in the 5+ years that I was a regular member, I never once saw him break character.
Amongst that community he was a beloved & revered figure, for his dedication to the role and his ability to bring levity to almost any topic.
ModusOperandi is the BBS’ DiskoPickle; and believe me, when I say that is an immense compliment.
I get it that this forum turned into more than anyone may have originally intended. but yet here we are; a community that has grown, bonded and developed roots, one that actually means something to the people who are a part of it.
Ok then why the hell would @othermichael care so much about this shtick joke account? Granted it was a pretty good shtick most of the time, but… a shtick nonetheless.
