Selected Purple Hearts

Below are posts that have had their (former) account holders awarded the coveted SASS purple heart. Given by Reality to those who have sacrificed their accounts for the greater good.

l33tshoe:

At first, I wanted to write a brief statement to politely and logically outline why you shouldn’t be either a sysadmin, or in any way associated with the forums. I abandoned this idea. It would have been a waste of time. Through reading your old posts, both on the forums and on your blog, I have come to one inescapable conclusion:

You’re a petty , self-congratulating , self-obsessed , insecure , immature , incompetent shell of a man.

It wouldn’t even matter if you were actually good at your job; you’d still deserve to be fired. If you’re this arrogant in failure , seeing you succeed would be the end of the forums themselves, as there wouldn’t be enough room in the universe for both the broken Dell servers and your overinflated ego.

I’ve read your blog , and I really don’t understand why a guy who claims to be busy working 60 hour weeks has time to explain at such length why he gets nothing done . If the purpose of your blog is to show off your accomplishments , why does it even exist at all? If I wanted to see you jerk off , I’d just sit outside of your window on a Friday night.

I appreciate that you’re a busy guy, but I’ve got to ask: instead of spending time banning people who complain about the errors in your work, why not take that time to actually fix them ? It seems like it would solve both the problems twice as fast, and I know you’ve got to make the best use of every precious second before you lapse into another panic attack .

I’m not even sure in which capacity you’re a greater failure — a horrible moderator , or a horrible sysadmin . It seems, though, that you’ve struck a great balance: banning people on a whim only after their browsers are subject to a barrage of 404s and SQL database errors .

It’s funny, really, that because of your continued ineptitude , Lowtax isn’t able to make enough money to hire someone to replace you . You’re only successful as an impediment to his success -– it’s just a shame that everyone else has to suffer your continued presence.

When you’re through banning this account, feel free to unleash your wit and call me a “cock sucking faggot nerd ” over at SASS . We’ve got 500 people who would love for you to come by and say hi.

I’d tell you to take care, but I’d rather you didn’t.

Sincerely,

internet user

(USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST)

karmaflux:

“You forgot to post I GUESS YOU KNOW HOW TO RUN THE FORUMS BETTER THAN ME I’VE BEEN DOING THIS FOR SIX YEARS SO DONT FUCKING BUY IT, DONT FUCKING DRINK IT, DONT FUCKING CLICK MY LINKS

Well, next time you ask for “input” maybe you should be less surprised when you provide halfass week-long solutions and then nothing gets better and you still have to wig out on an out-of-control GBS like once a month.

I eagerly await another lighthearted zany post about how beleaguered you are by internet people, and how successful your business is!”

(USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST)

SonOfOrbo:

Posted in D&D Dating and Pictorial Free-for-all Circus.

MANGOSTEEN JUICE SURE IS THE BEST

FOOT FETISH LAFFO RIP OFF ARTISTS

PERMABAN FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE PLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEASE.

COMRADE MCCAIN’S OKCUPID PROFILE OI OI SKINHEAD BOI TO THE MAXIMUM GAY

internet user:

Posted in “Do you have a question, comment, or suggestion?”.

Lowtax, it’s good that you tried fixing the privacy policy, but this:

Something Awful LLC reserves the right to disseminate usernames, IP addresses, or email addresses to third parties in certain situations (ie, credit card fraud, harassment, stalking, illegal activities).

still doesn’t address what happened. Most (if not all) of the alleged SASS users whose usernames you gave out didn’t commit credit card fraud, harass, “stalk” in any meaningful sense of the word, or indulge in illegal activities. And you gave out their information anyway. I also notice that you conspicuously ignored Sideshow Bob’s suggested change to the privacy policy.

Even as it stands now after all this to-ing and fro-ing, the privacy policy can be trivially circumvented by giving out users’ info and then accusing those users of unspecified “stalking” or “credit card fraud”, as happened here.

It’s also risibly hypocritical. All four bad things you implied had been done by the people whose info you gave out have been done by faithful SASS-hating goons many times before, and to a greater extent.

• “Credit card fraud” and other assorted forms of mail fraud take place regularly in SA-Mart, and the rules actively discourage reporting the fraud to SA forum staff.
• What you call “stalking” isn’t “stalking” only when it happens to you or certain SA admins. It’s been done repeatedly in GBS (e.g. in the cases of Pimpsolo and Alias777 among many others) and in FYAD, frequently without punishment or even reproach. In fact it’s been done so often that GBS has its own special term for it — “Internet detectivery”.
• And let’s not forget all of the occasions when goons have posted the addresses and phone numbers of politicians and other hated figures while encouraging everyone else to visit, send mail, or call. That certainly counts as harassment.
• Illegal activities? Oh yeah, like goons posting in TCC about how they consume illegal drugs, posting in TFR about shooting up their neighbours, and posting in GBS about how they totally took someone out on the street in “self-defence”! And let’s not forget the files that weren’t shared on the file forums that never existed!

I’m also curious as to why you’re so eager to declare this privacy policy issue a “dead and rotting horse” even though the policy was obviously still evolving, and your prior three attempts at declaring “el fin” and “the end” and shutting down discussion by closing threads have all failed to stop people talking about it. It’s evidently still of interest to more than the “five” alleged “obsessed” SASS hermits; if the issue were minor and insignificant, you wouldn’t have to threaten to ban people to try to stop them talking about it.

Sites like SASS are popular (someone in the Helldump mentioned, for instance, that SASS has something like 2500 users now) because goons who want to leave feedback:

• Are discouraged from giving feedback in email or QCS because of threats of bans.
• Get told to sit down and shut up by others who haven’t even bothered to understand the issue at hand and are more interested in suppressing civil discussion than fostering it.
• Are accused of being “Anti-Lowtax”, “SASSycophants“, or “carrying Buttes’ water“.
• Have their comments interpreted as personal attacks or exaggerated and then used as a pretext to make arbitrary, sweeping changes (for instance Shark Week, which was instituted as a response to putative “misogyny” that was actually targeted almost entirely at Icequeen, Ozma, McCaine, and Lioness).
• Are wary of capricious mod sass rules. (E.g. it’s not OK to badmouth Icequeen or pantsfish’s decisions, but it’s fine to insult Al and his decisions (not to say that insulting Icequeen/pantsfish or not insulting Al is a good thing, just that the definition of “mod sass” should be consistent)).
• Are banned for “lying” (q.v. a43) or being “Wrong.” (q.v. Serph, who was in fact quite correct in his assertion that Fistgrrl took notes on people who posted about SA on other websites)
• Are accused of being “obsessive“.

This last point is especially hypocritical because you and Fistgrrl both behave obsessively yourselves. Fistgrrl keeps note of what people say about Something Awful on external websites, and you spent your birthday cultivating drama in QCS and the Helldump by trying to stamp out certain conversations.

Another good example of the admins creating drama is good old Shark Week, where everyone who had mentioned sincere concerns in the moderator feedback threads was painted as a misogynist, and those who weren’t happy about that were summarily banned.

The thing is:

• Raising criticisms doesn’t cause drama when they can be reasonably discussed in a sane manner.
• Banning people with grievances doesn’t magically neutralise them forever, it just gives them another grievance.
• Sending in admins to deride people with feedback produces drama and is hypocritical (after all, one can hardly accuse other people of taking your website too seriously when one’s supporting a family of three with it or spending hours a day administrating it with one’s wife).
• Publically slandering complainers as misogynists isn’t going to encourage polite feedback, but it will make it more snarky, devious, and ill-intentioned.

I appreciate that you’ve gone to the trouble of making QCS, and doubtless everyone else is too, but it doesn’t do much good when admins take offence to decent feedback and either twist it as they feel like it or outright mock it. Mocking people for “taking the Internet seriously” especially doesn’t wash when your long-time coder’s quit because he can’t handle the drama he’s helped stir up, or when an administrator posts advice like:

 

elpintogrande wrote:

You can play favorites on the forums, as long as your favorites are your administrative peers.

It’s impossible to tell whether you’re truly interested in hearing feedback. You give out mixed signals. You opened The Comment Box, but only moderators and admins could discuss the submissions. You closed that. You opened QCS, then closed it in a flurry of bans. You’ve now reopened QCS again, and again you’re nixing certain topics of discussion on the grounds that they’re “dead horses”, even though they’re patently not. And now anyone who reads a certain website where a few of the users crack jokes about your family and your website (this after you posted a Photoshop of your own daughter crushed by play equipment, and set the Weekend Web on SA) is an Enemy and can have their SA details given out to anyone, apropos of nothing else. That’s quite an overreaction to a forum you claim to neither read nor care about.

Something Awful’s a great place. I hope it continues being a great place — if I didn’t care what happened to it then I wouldn’t have written this up — but I’m concerned that things will get worse if people who post feedback are treated as targets and scapegoats rather than members of the community. The Poor Richard attitude you evince is really grating in the face of your claims to want suggestions, and it’s a cheap way to deflect comment.

Stay tuned for more!

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