To those of you that have expressed your appreciation to the Moderators for their hard work, I thank you.
I am going to do something perhaps other Mods won't appreciate here, but I am going to air some laundry so some of you who perhaps think we are ogre's can get a better idea of what goes on. And since John/JRPower/Spectabalis33/Sundoode188/OneLasyKilobyte (and those are the names I remember off the top of my head) has offered up his life here as an example:
Spec was at one point a moderator, he was demoted, if memory serves, when Phil demoted several people, not because they did anything wrong, but because there were simply to many topics, to many mods, and the boards were confusing. (I may be shady on the details here, this all happened while I was on hiatus for reasons similar to this topic.)
And I will tell you in all honesty, I don't know why Spec/Sundoode was banned initially, I basically was so disgusted with some peoples behavior that I stopped coming here for almost a year, I just stuck my head in the mod/admin forum to say Hi. BY all rights, Phil should have sacked me (and he did as Admin I am a SuperMod now.), but regardless, I have no idea why he got banned. However, as you can see by his plethora of names, he kept trying to sneak back in under the wire, and eventually he did as Sundoode.
We didn't notice for a while, and when it finally fame to light a couple months ago that Sundoode was Spec, the mods were decisively split on whether to can his ID or let him stay. Those of us that were perhaps more ignorant of his true self said "He's behaving now, maybe he has matured" and let him have an official second chance.
Second Chances are something we have allowed in the past, infact, I can remember only 2. This was one of those instances, one of the rules I set up a long time ago was that Second Chancers would never get to 'ride the glory' of their old names, you have to come in with a new name and build yourself in the community that way. One of Specs conditions of returning, was that he not associate sundoode to spectabalis, which he did in this topic, but even then, the ogre mods let him keep posting, or should I say string the rope around his own neck.
And this morning, our mature friend logged back in again under the name "OneLastKilobyte" to take a parting shot at Phil, that of course was deleted and the new account locked.
As far as other vauge things Sundoode implied: Signature File, Spec was asked nicely to reduce the size of his signature, it was quite simply larger than most posts (even many of my novels that I post here!) because he is imature, he turned right back around and reported HellZ for having a large signature file as well. What happened? I contacted Hellz and asked him to shrink it, did it happen immediately? NO, this is not a realtime environment, it had nothing to do with favoritism. Did some one call Spec a tattle tail and a whiner? Yup, it was me. I let him know how it appears when you are called out for something, and then you turn around and rat out a friend for the same thing. it's WHINING. Hellz would have gotten a PM about his sig when a MOD noticed it, we don't notice everything at once folks.
I won't even comment on the game threads, I find some of them amusing, all good things in moderation is the key.
We are taking permenant measures to lock this imature child from our forums forever. A moderator has called and talked to his parents, His parents are taking measures to block him from coming here on their end as well. We have only had to make calls to ISP's and Parents one time before that I can remember, for a racist spouting garbage on our forums. Esteemed company he keeps.
Every mod who stood up for him and let him back on feels incredibly betrayed.
I know it's not the full story, I quite simply wasn't here for most of it. But rest assured, specs life here is finished, and it was not without it's share of 2nd and 3rd chances. We bent over backwards for him because many of us considered him a friend, *wool over eyes*.
New policy. NO MORE SECOND CHANCES. We have been burned every time we tried it, and we will not do it again. So, fair warning to everyone. If you do something worthy of getting banned, it will be permenant. And please, don't feel like the boogyman is looking over your shoulder, if your a good person acting responsibly, you have no reason to worry, and we tend to talk to you before things get out of hand unless it involves porn/vulgarity/racism and the like.
BTW, for those of you who still think we are oppressive, remember, mods started out as hobbyists, and that is what they are primarily, the fact that they were chosen to exert some power here speaks volumes for their charachter. Please always keep in mind that a Mod would rather talk to you as a friend than as a mod, that they would rather spend their time here participating rather than cleaning up messes and reading stuff that doesn't interest them. Some people think being a mod gives you cool cosmic powers and sets you apart. being a mod is simply stepping up and taking responsibilty for something you care about, this community. If mods get overzealous in their actions, keep in mind it is done out of love for this community, if they didn't love this place, and by wrote, if they didn't care about YOU, they wouldn't be spending their time here.
OH, and on a personal note, if you have no idea of what impact this responsibility has on a person, keep in mind that it KILLED my love of this hobby. I still have a few plants and will certainly enjoy their beauty... but you will notice that I don't spend much of my time in the actual plant forums here anymore, I simply don't care. Why? I can ramble off some names, Tim, MattiLord of the Pings, Porn, and the list goes on... I don't want your sympathy, so don't think that is what I am going for, I want you to understand that what my friends do here, is a hard thankless job that takes its toll. I am frankly amazed that most of the original mod crew is still here.
That being said, we now return you to your regularly scheduled forum usage.