Copyright Thread

I'm with you on Brahumus, he sounded condescending since his first posts. Hopefully, he will stop this attitude.

The copyright thread is interesting but pretty much everything has been said. As I haven't participated in the thread, I will close it.

Yeah, me neither. I know he posted yesterday in the Doho's thread and it wasn't about Doho's thread but rather the continuation of the Tom Jolly's patent thread... sigh. He's a real pain, but a ban and account delete? Ouch, that's harsh. I guess it's too late now.

His attitude drove josdan from bgdf. :(

Edit: Actually, if he was "spamming" in the sense of posting several messages even after you delete them and tell him to stop... that's enough for a ban in my book.

The only "mistake" I think that Matthew made was to make an administrative decision while angry. I think that waiting for a day to cool down would have been a better path.

However, I think that the conclusion you would have come to after that cooling off still very likely should have been to delete his account. Brahmulus/Goldar is the worst kind of member: a prolific poster who has absolutely nothing to say, but just wants to display his immature sense of humor. (His "unlikely heroes" thread was some of the most obnoxious self-indulgent garbage I have ever read in my entire life) I put him at age 16 max.

But now, he has most definitely crossed the line. I have never seen anyone threaten violence against someone in a game group before. He probably thinks that it's just another joke. I don't think there's anything funny about what he has said.

We need to have a way to prevent people from accessing the site and posting again, creating new accounts, whatever. This guy is as good a candidate as we've ever had for that treatment. I have no idea how this can be done, but if someone figures it out, please let the rest of us know (or at least, let us know that you know how to do it, so that if someone needs to be excommunicated, we at least know how to get the process going).

In the meantime, Goldar is filling the forums with deragatory comments about the admins. I wonder if an actual forum post from the admins laying out the facts of the situation, including selections (or full text) from the posts that we've deleted and the IM conversations that we've had with him, might be appropriate to keep us on the up and up. Not that anyone in the community would actually side with him rather than us, but just so that people might feel more confident in shouting him down if he starts up the "admins are jerks" claptrap.

This guy is poison, and Matthew, I feel, did exactly the right thing. I hope that you won't refrain from these kinds of judgement calls in the future, although I can understand if your enthusiasm for doing so is somewhat spent. We shouldn't have to teach basic manners to people, and for the most part, the people our site attracts are all stable, clear-thinking folks. It's very annoying to have a loud, irrational person who's determined not to go away. We need a protocol to be able to deal with such people.

-Jeff

PS I suspect this you guys know this already, but I'm not saying this simply because Brahmulus was a jerk to me. I wouldn't have kicked him out over the comments he made to me, although I did think Matthew's plea for more polite discourse was appropriate. But his behavior and open defiance of Matthew's authority is unacceptable, and it's for that reason (and the threats of violence) that I say he has to go.

I think he was chronologically older than that, but he was *much less* mature than some of our members who we know are in their mid-teens.

I think the proper end-result was reached.

We may want to write up and publish an easy-to-find "Terms of Service" or "Forum Rules" post. Here's an example of a simple one that has been working quite well for a war-gaming community I take part in: http://www.kaomaris.com/phpNuke/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=397

Of course, we probably want to add in rules about respecting the admins/mods and an appeals process regarding the different types of bans and for locking threads. While work is still busy for me, I'd be happy to take a first swipe at such an animal, which would at least give us something to start with that everyone could make adjustments to.

-Bryk

To further that, Goldar/Brahm got on last night as a user named Chief (I.P. address the same and the e-mail address for him, info@zombiecity.com, led me to the zombiecity.com website, which clearly states at the bottom 'Website by Brahm'). I started IMing Chief, at first asking him how he was doing, welcome to the site, let me know if I could help, etc. Normal newcommer friendliness. He responded, acting like a foreigner who knew very little english. I asked him how he heard about the site, he replied google search... He said his Dad was a member here. I asked him who his Dad was on the site. He dodged the question. I asked again. Now he said his Dad didn't like to and/or know how to use computers. I finally had enough and confronted him about being Brahm/Goldar. He then said he was using his friend's cable modem. At that point I asked him to drop the charade, and that I would be willing to listen to his grievances.. But he 'stuck' to his foreign guy 'my english is bad' charade. I offered several more times to listen to his grievances, still nothing. I have no feelings of regret regarding the ban. It's obvious he has no respect for this community and that he thinks we are a bunch of fools, so at this point I'm shaking the dust off of my feet regarding Braham/Goldar/Chief.

-Michael

Ugh!

Ok I have a solution. Basically go into the PhpBB admin section (from the admin menu, hit forums). Then under the user menu (all the way at the bottom on the left), click on the management link. Type in the username and click 'look up user'. After that screen loads, go all the way to the bottom under Special Admin Only Fields... Click no for the option 'User is Active", also click No for the option 'User can Send private messages'. This will highly cripple the user. They won't be able to send PMs or even get to the forums and it doesn't matter if they're already logged in or not... This method will stop them dead in their tracks. I.E. Anytime they can be in the middle of reading a message, it doesn't matter. The next time they try to pull down information all they will get is a blank screen.. Thoughts?

-M

Folks.

I e-mailed Brahmulus... Here is his reply...

it totally hit me after I re-read your email. I didnt recognize your
name, or the abbreviated BGDF believe it or not (I have it in favorites),
and I have been so busy on this TV show that my mind is in 1000
different places, apologies.

I heard you were trying to reach me.

Heres the nutshell you seek:

One day I saw I couldnt get into my account (didnt check and/or recieve
an email until much later), and I had no idea what was up... so I
created a new account called Goldar. If two accounts is rampant mis-use of
multiples I apologize, i just didn't know what was going on. Now I see
that Goldar is blocked as well, so I'm kind of over it for now.

FWIW that mathew kid flipped out on me with a pretty unprofessional and
nasty personal email saying "SCREW YOU" and "YOURE NOT WELCOME" and
then your other boy, Jawarend or whatever, said that you have no power
whatsoever and could never overturn mathews decision.

As a side note this was bad timing as I had just turned on the nextdoor
neighbor kid (who helps me in playtesting) to the forum as well.

So listen, as far as reinstating, no worries brutha, I'm gonna take
care of business here and then slide back in with a new account/IP in a
few days to see if anything is peaking my ineterest on the forum.

I really do get (and give!) alot on that forum, and intend to get alot
more!

Thanks Michael!

Gotta go,

Jeff, Matthew: Thoughts? Is he a big liar?

I'd really like to let him back on (in reality I see no way of really stopping him. He seems to have avenues of getting around any security we implement and an endless supply of e-mails to register from). And before you get upset, it's not because of what he did or didn't do, it's because I feel that keeping people from the site is not what we are about.

On the other hand. I really want to confront this guy about his awful behavior. He seems to be playing it off like he's the victim and he's had no part of this whole process which is complete BS in my eyes. I'm going to reply to him tonight but I wanted to get your thoughts first.

-M

Well said.... and I agree 100%.

Here is my concern... He WILL be able to get around any bans we place upon him. Sure we can reban him as he makes himself evident, but then we have to second guess whether or not every new user that comes online is just another incarnation of Brahm. Is this what we want? And what if he wants some sort of retribution against us. I know we (Matthew and I) briefly discussed this in IMs, but I personally don't want that sort of heat on the site. It's bad enough when hackers attack us just because we run a specific software package. I can't imagine how bad it will be when/if someone actually has a grudge against us. I know you can't live in fear, but I'm trying to think realistically here, because it will ultimately be me cleaning up the mess left behind.

So my reason for contacting him is to lay out his offenses before him, let him own up to them and apologize, and then be reinstated, To me this seems better for everyone in the long run. Obviously he's not in the right state of mind or heart for that to happen at the moment. Honestly I hope he just gets tired of game design and just eventually goes away. This may happen if we smooth things out. He may go away eventually anyway. I'm just not sure I want to take that chance.

Matthew, If you feel really strongly about this, then I will accept your decision and he will stay officially banned. The last thing I want is rift between you and I to affect this community.

-Michael