DAMN YOU CHICK

I think I probably hold that one.

I know I got banned once for mentioning that some jerkbag named Bahimiron got banned.

Very meta.

I once listed all of my bans earlier on this forum when my ire was a lot more up than it is now. There were five of them. Needless to say I don't agree with most of them. One of them is an offense that was genuinely against the rules, and even then I don't think Tom banned me for the right violation. Done is done, though. A year on and I think most of us are better off.

Better than the time you got banned for wishing a celebrity happy birthday.

Anson Williams, specifically. Also, Heather Locklear.

100% true.

I got banned for griping about his banning of Lizard_King and then getting really pissed after watching Hurt Locker and seeing what an awful movie it was.

http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showpost.php?p=2099042&postcount=841
http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showpost.php?p=2099693&postcount=885
http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showpost.php?p=2114122&postcount=335
http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showpost.php?p=2117492&postcount=340

I still think it was bullshit.

I got temp-banned once for drunkenly (and repeatedly) telling some asshole to go fuck himself over the Wisconsin public sector union situation. Sobered up, apologized to Tom (I actually did feel bad) via email and all was well.

(In other news, I still lurk the politics forum there occasionally [shut up, sometimes I hate myself] and totally would have gotten banned again for telling a certain rich I-got-mine asshole to go fuck himself last night if I felt like posting again. Christ, what a prick he is.)

Though I ended up over here for a number of reasons, I've never had any terrible beef with Tom. I mean, he's massively wrong about games all the time and I'm still annoyed with him for constantly shitting up the Civ V thread with nonstop shitty passive-aggressive trolling, but w/e.

Surprisingly, a couple of posters I had on ignore at QT3 have stopped annoying me so badly over here and are still not ignored. Not sure if they're actually better posters these days or if I'm just more tolerant (or better at detecting and not being upset at trolling).

No, I'm totally better behaved now.



Also link to the thread/post you're talking about for those of us curious, but not inclined to wade through what's left of P&R.

He's either talking about the guy named after a watch or the guy whose name is a parentage question. Not sure which.

I can't take any critic of any modern media seriously if they still haven't seen The Wire. YOU HEAR ME, SEILER????

Y'know, I haven't been back to Qt3 for a couple of weeks now (or so it seems), and I don't really miss it.

It helps that, with a few exceptions, most of the people I enjoyed interacting with over there have made their way over here.

I never got banned. :( otoh, I haven't seen Hurt Locker, and in game threads where Tom participated I mostly stayed out. I think I once started to talk to him about Bioshock 2 and I quickly aborted because I didn't want to catch a ban because I disagreed with him on something.

I said the exact same thing...back in February. ;)

Huh, I watched the Hurt Locker but apparently didn't comment in that thread. I don't remember it well enough to do so now.

I've also never been banned from qt3, but I think I got a warning once. I'm just too nice of a guy, I guess.

I wish I never had. You won't get those 2 hours or the brain cells back.

Yeah, Tom's totally random and indiscriminate use of the banhammer really created a nurturing and safe environment for discussion.

As an objective observer who only lurked at Qt3 and hardly ever posted, the difference is clear. When Lum bans someone, (a) it is clear why he does so and (b) he may be personally annoyed, but he does so for the benefit of the community, because the individual is offensive or disruptive to the group. When Tom bans someone, (a) he refuses to justify himself but worse (b) it is in nearly every case all about Tom, either because a poster disagrees with him on something petty such a a film or game (and Tom is usually wrong but that's just a bonus), or dares to question or even to talk about, his moderation decisions. Even the mass banning was really only about one thing -- eliminating everyone who might be a threat to question his moderation.

There has never been a whiff of complaint about the posters who've been permabanned from one of those forums -- BF. Hilariously, of course, a lot of them are now Qt3 P&R stalwarts.

I may regret this.

What WAS the Hurt Locker fiasco? I don't watch many movies, so I steered clear of that forum most of the time.

Same here. I'm not banned but now prefer this community for my forumming, largely because the half-dozen or so "value destroyers" there did not come here so I don't have to interact with them. I use Facebook to stay in touch with the few people I like who didn't come over.

I don't remember all the details, but basically...

1. Tom really enjoyed the movie.
2. Lizard King posted that he thought parts were unrealistic and he didn't like it.
3. Tom got defensive and the discussion got heated (I don't recall if this was all Tom's fault or if Lizard King helped escalate things - it's probably a matter of perception).
4. Lizard King gets banned.
5. People say "What the fuck, Tom?"
6. People get warned, and some people defending Lizard King's right to dislike The Hurt Locker also get banned.
7. I forget what happens after that, but I think Lizard King comes back eventually but gets banned again (?)

At this point I barely remember the details of my various bans. Not really important in the grand scheme of things, other than as a reminder that Tom is a petty grandstanding dick.

Have to say, of all the blows up, I think the Hurt Locker one has to be my favorite. It's the moment Tom came face to face with the fact there are people out there who have a better grasp on certain topics than he does and aren't going to back down. Two thumbs up, would read again.

Edit: Of course, I have no idea why he'd choose LK as the one to argue with over something like Hurt Locker.

Expanding on 4:

Not only was LK banned, but Tom consistently portrayed it in a "Why you make me hurt you, baby"? light. His hands were tied, he had no choice, nobody regrets the necessity more than him, etc. Lizard King was an awesome poster, and an awesome person, but he just couldn't control himself, and ultimately Tom just had to slap a bitch. You understand how these things go.

Expanding on 7:
I forget exactly how/when Lizard King came back, but it was definitely before the Great Unbanning. He said a couple things which made it clear that he knew the score w/out actually coming right out and stating that the score was that Tom was a petty vindictive bitch. It was clear that he saw that completely ignoring Tom was the cost of posting at QT3, and he seemed fine with that. I got the impression that his time in the military taught him the value of (and necessity of) sometimes just ignoring & working around raging douchebags. Tom occasionally tried to bait LK, in a rather transparent & passive-aggressive way, but LK never rose to the challenge. At all. He also greatly toned down his vitriol and aggression in general, although that change seems like an overall change that occurred when he left the military. (He's still "toned down", even though he's probably free to be more like his old self here if he wanted to be.)

Anyways, so LK was pretty much a model poster, hadn't caused any troubles at all that I'm aware of, and was a highly valued member of the posting community. But when Tom returned & banned everybody in fit of pique, LK was on the chopping block (again) anyways.

Edit - Oh, and tagging Lizard_King, since we are talking about him. I doubt he'll care, but it seems fair to let him know.

I never got banned, but then I am a pansy, kiss ass and REFORMED Tom apologist.

There was also an incident in which Tom got upset about something and someone posted an explosion gif from Hurt Locker as a metaphor for Tom's reaction. He was banned, and then just about everyone who asked about it, commented on it, or thought about it was also banned.

I don't believe LK was banned during Tom's return. I'm pretty sure he was one of those who received a PM that was along the lines of 'you are a valued poster, please stay but be nicer' a few minutes before Tom threw up his 'this is how things are' post and people started to notice that some members of the community had disappeared.

With me, it was really multiple fiascoes that came to a head around questions of what makes something appropriate for use in entertainment spanning from Red Faction: Guerrilla's as an Iraq war metaphor to Six Days In Fallujah and, bizarrely, Robert Novak's death. The important part was that while no one walked out of these things covered in glory, only Tom was using passive-aggressive goading along with the increasingly more aggressive use of bans and their chilling effects to lure people into breaking the ever-shifting rules of the forum. Underlying that was creative use of private messages, which regardless of their content would then be alluded to (by both Chick and his shrinking but passionate group of defenders) as both the "real" reason for the banning and inappropriate for public viewing even if the bannee wanted to make his case. Because they were private, see, not because they might show a different thing than "fuck you moderator".

Each of these things on their own would have been a normal thing that happens sometimes to moderators. Together, they built up along with other disputes with other people to the Tom Chick Self Ban period followed by the Return of Chick To Ban Everyone and Ask Others To Leave By PM If It Might Be Too Unseemly To Just Ban Them. Then, the Exodus.

So the details aren't important, but the problems were real.

Raife maybe?

I won't hold it against you. ;)

I did a quick search trying to look for the .gif I posted when LK got banned, and this is the first thing that actually popped up, so don't accuse me of caring too much but yeah that's basically what it sounded like:

That was fantastic. How can you run intarweb forums and be so thin-skinned?

I remember at one point when I was gone someone (possibly MSUSteve) posted to say something along the lines of "I wish Bahimiron here here to post his opinion of whatever the fuck it is that they were talking about." and Tom's response was the insanely disingenuous "So do I."

Fuck that guy.

I was temp banned because I unintentionally skirted too close to spoiler territory in the "hey, no spoilers you book reading assholes" Game of Thrones TV thread, received a PM from Athryn asking me to stay out of the thread since I'd read the series, I wrote a dickish PM back (for which I later apologized) because I thought the qt3 spoiler crowd were getting carried away, Athryn got Bill Dungsroman involved and the drama 'o meter spiked into the red, people complained to Tom, he felt obligated to read the thread, wrote an email to me saying that while he was pissed off that the situation had resulted in him reading about aired episodes and has now irrevocably ruined all of GRRM's story for him, he didn't see any outright spoilers written by me, so I was cool to continue posting in that thread and at qt3. Someone, I don't remember who, wrote that I was always an asshole at qt3 and I wrote back that Tom had told me via email that I wasn't in the wrong and was still allowed to post. At which point Tom sent me an email saying, "zomg, you dragged me into this mess, banned!!!!" I wrote back that I wasn't the one who'd brought the situation to his attention or asked for him to moderate the thread, and that he'd previously written agreeing that I hadn't violated forum rules. But, you know, I'd mentioned private email, so. . . .

Surprisingly enough, my one and only ban. Though I do manage to piss off enough right-wing FB friends (mainly classmates from high school 30 years ago) that my friends list is in constant flux on FB.

To be fair to athryn, your insistence on going into book territory in the TV thread was fucking annoying.

Yeah, I wasn't trying to be unfair or anything to Athryn and fully cop to being a jerk in my PM to her. And I was enjoying reading the thread, people's reactions as events unfolded, and stepped too close to spoilery stuff that one time. I know I'm not going to outright try to ruin a book/movie for other people, but forum members only know most other members tangentially, so looking back I can see where there could be an element of nervousness. *This* handful of guys we know have read the books keep posting, and sooner or later someone's gonna slip; please leave us alone before. . .oh, shit, your big toe is touching the line!!!!!

My point with the above post was that out of all that little spat, the thing that tipped Tom's scales was referencing an email only hours old that dealt directly with the situation. Just very odd to me. I was the only active mod at Beyond3D during the post-Radeon 9700 and Fermi days last decade, so I know playing peacekeeper isn't always fun or easy. But I would never have thought to ban someone for quoting me saying they weren't violating board rules.

I thought LK was re-banned, at least temporarily, for this gem:

http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showpost.php?p=2759807&postcount=478

In response, Bill D. told Tom to "grow the hell up." But Bill didn't get banned. Bill would've had to kill a puppy to get banned.

Pretty much every topic I've been interested in on QT3 in the last few months gets spammed by one of three posters. Which is a bummer, because there's still some good shit on there occasionally, but prolific fuckwits can ruin everything very very quickly. Ignore lists just don't fix that kind of problem.

The tapir fiasco was way more entertaining overall though.

Yeah, I was going to post a tapir in this thread if the opportunity presented itself, but on further thought, do you ever really need a reason to post one?

Nah, that was just juvenile.

Hrmm, I'm not actually seeing LK as banned.