I know it is a bit boring and takes the gloss off some of the childish mystique Gamble and others spin around these events but…
Mr Pilsen’s account has been deactivated for his continued insistence on creating trouble for trouble’s sake. He had been warned and took no notice. Like others before he took a perverse, childish and immature delight in pushing things.
I don’t tend to get upset (these days) by such behaviour and, as a result, I am sure tolerated it for longer than I should but enough was enough.
As Matron points out there are various ways of ceasing posts from a particular account, and as you’ve observed these manifest themselves in different ways with regard to how that member’s status then appears. No great relevance to how it is done, I do usually in most cases try to retain posts and deactivation is an easy way to do that while also allowing the poster’s identity to remain visible.
The forum takes up a great deal of my time, inevitably at the expense of other ‘stuff’, and life is too short to be continually managing the petty spats that occasionally flare up. It also takes up the time of others such as Matron and people like Bob Rolf and Nathan (plus others) who help by managing competitions and such-like. It continues to irk me that there are people who seem to, very selfishly, ignore and discount the unpaid time and efforts of others and embark on a campaign of forum-bashing or disruption.
Multiple accounts are very difficult to moderate and to be honest I don’t have the time or resource to scrutinise IP addresses or look at managing use of proxy servers, etc, so we are obviously open to clones and suchlike. I may look into whether there is software/technology around to help manage that. I’d welcome any pms/advice on the topic.
The forum relies wholly on the goodwill of its members and, despite best efforts of a very few, I think we retain that goodwill. I hope/think we are fair regarding moderation and, I suspect, I am a bit TOO fair on occasions, there is always a tricky judgement on where the line between spiky debate and unacceptable, personalised attacks lies. As I’ve said before, when it gets overtly personal or when things veer towards bullying behaviour is when I feel we should be stepping in.
I have had increasingly less time over the last five or so years to spend on the forum due to a combination of personal, work and business reasons but I am as passionate about TRF as I have ever been. We are still by some distance the UK’s (Europe’s?) most visited stand-alone horse racing discussion forum and, although our traffic has dipped slightly it hasn’t dipped significantly and our unique visitor tally has actually increased. And I put much of that slight drop in pageviews down to my own inactivity in promoting and developing the forum rather than anything else.
So, my radar is on the alert at the minute as I again focus on ridding the forum of the pettiness that every year or two surfaces.
In that respect, Gamble, much as I often enjoy your way with words and recognise that your forum reflections are aimed at a very specialised section of our audience, you will need to urgently cease publicly slating the forum on its own pages. I’m sure you understand that. Your forum put-downs don’t do you justice, aren’t based in fact and have surprised me.
Invariably, when any ‘unpleasantness’ surfaces there are usually only a couple of underlying reasons –
A perverse and/or childish need on the part of one individual or another to feed his ego by showing he can actually have some impact or power on the world (naughty child syndrome, particularly prevalent ages 2 to 5 – ‘look at me, I exist, everyone look at me NOW’)
People not letting things lie and, as a result, pissing off the majority into reacting (the last word syndrome – I’ve been guilty of that myself so I recognise it readily)
I think most of our bans have been a result of repeated instances of one or both of the above and the ignoring of warnings. Although, to be fair, I’ve actually banned very few. Pilsen’s deactivation was the first of any member of any long-standing in a very long time. On the high-profile oft-quoted ones Ian Davies was before my time, as was Razeen I think (not 100% sure re-Razeen).
And there goes another 3/4 hour.