harmony wrote:Nope. I'm one of the banished; I can't even read, let alone register under a different name.
I'd like to know why. I am well aware that people get back on boards under different names, which is the only reason I've ever heard of for locking someone's IP out of a site. If your situation is different, I'd like to hear it.
Years ago, 2 friends and I were surfing the web, looking for LDS sites. I was a veteran of LDStalk, LDSfriends, The Sheltering Tree, Folk of the Fringe, and Notes from Zarahemla. My friends were new to the web. Josh Skains and I were battling about polygamy on the Fringe, when he invited me to ZLMB where he was sure the apologists could set me straight. So when we found ZLMB, we were expecting something a lot different. What we saw was as cantankerous, ornery, unkind, vicious a group of purported LDS members as we'd ever seen. So we decided to see how they would react to someone totally off the wall. Would they show kindness and love as our religion teaches, or would they attack? We created WAzing, and we registered so we could post. Suffice to say, we created a firestorm, since the first post we put up sent us to the principal's office (we called DCP a self-righteous prick). We posted as WAzing for a week or more, and the place was flying. The mods did NOT appreciate us, because we were totally off the wall, but we knew enough about LDS to show that we were members. Eventually, the mods had to shut down the board for a couple of days to clean up the mess. DCP threatened to leave the board if WAzing wasn't banned. Juliann and Pahoran went more and more ballistic with every post. We received several threats of bodily harm, and real life stalking became a very real possibility, as several posters were tracing my ISP.
Then we uncloaked and told everyone the whole episode had been an experiment to further the study of human reactions. I took the heat, because I was the only one anyone knew. Oh my. Some of the posters were spiteful, some vicious, some were very kind (I remember cal was one of the few who emerged from that episode with her integrity intact). You can guess who reacted well to that very public call for repentence and who didn't.
The next time I got sideways of the mods on ZLMB was over a lie that Juliann told. She claimed to have seen a transcript for Thomas Murphy's presentation at a conference. When pressed to produce the transcript, she refused to acknowledge that it didn't exist. She claimed that she'd meant notes an attendee had taken, yet it was transparent that she had indeed claimed that she had a transcript of the session. The thread went on for days, until she finally admitted, albeti very uncharitably, that she had lied and that there really was no transcript. I was on very thin ice from that moment on, because I would not let it die. Shades was my partner in that one.
Over the next few years, most of the LDS posters left ZLMB, and it became the outpost of apostates and non-members with a few TBM's that it is today. I was blamed for that eventual demise of ZLMB, even though by that time, I was banned from ZLMB (for a thread about LDS men's sexual issues).
Knowing how the mods at FAIR felt about harmony, I registered on FAIR as Blink, a nickname I'd used for years in LDS chat rooms. I posted for quite a while, under the mod radar. But when I got sideways of Juliann and Nighthawke on a thread about polygamy, she realized who I was, and I was immediately put on the Q. When I asked how long I'd be on the Q, the PM from the mods was that I would never get off the Q. When I asked why, I was told it was because I was harmony. None of my posts ever made it out of the Q. So I re-registered, this time as Dill Pickles. I existed for several months as the Pickle, contributing my perspective in a very lowkey manner. I was banned as the Pickle without any warning, without any messages or emails, simply because the powers that be figured out that the Pickle was harmony and I'd committed the unpardonable sin of jumping the Q they'd placed Blink on. I was Q'd because I was harmony and banned for the same reason.
At this time, my ISP is banned and I cannot even read the threads. The only time I see a thread from MAD is when someone brings it here.
Others here have been similiarly banned because they have good arguments, because they caught our apologists in lies or gossip, because they have an off-the-wall sense of humor, and for simply being who they are. Even TruthDancer has been banned in the past, although I think she can currently post.