- Joined
- Apr 2, 2001
- Messages
- 30,944
- Points
- 113
As some of you already know, it was necessary to ban Drew70 from the TMF today. Banning is something that we only do very rarely, and only when all other avenues have been exhausted. There are only a handful of people on the forum who have been banned in our eight year history, so the first thing I want to make clear is that it's not something that was undertaken lightly. The subject of Drew being banned is something that the moderators of the TMF have discussed quite literally for years.
And the truth is, I've always been his biggest defender. I've had friends get personally angry at me because of my tendency to forgive Drew's faults and behaviors. But my feeling has always been that A) It SHOULD be hard to get banned from the TMF. I take great pride in what an open forum we are. And B) Drew's history in the tickling community made him deserve a lot of latitude. Drew was one of the earliest contributors to the online tickling community, once spending hundreds of hours to take the trouble of scanning images of tickling from magazines and posting them online to share. In those days Drew and I were good friends:
http://groups.google.com/group/alt....=en&lnk=gst&q=jeff+drew+nice#86d83d6d618ecb74
Then this is a post I made last year in our administration forum, defending Drew from an outcry of people wanting him banned:
That was in August of 2007. As recently as that, I felt very strongly that Drew should not be banned.
But unfortunately, Drew has never really been able to get along on a moderated forum. When we had barely even launched, he would post on AMT and complain about the moderation of the forum. He's been very open all along about the fact that he feels there should be no moderation, everyone should be free to say anything they want.
The problem with that of course, is that the result is that the loudest and most aggressive people dominate every discussion, while more soft spoken people are ignored, or even abused. AMT proved that conclusively. The more people who started participating in the online tickling community, the more vileness we started to see. People flocked to the TMF in droves to get away from that kind of wild west, shoot anyone you want, mentality. And the success of the forum seems to strongly suggest, if not prove, the validity of that. In eight years we've gone from 800 to 80,000.
But this was never the right home for Drew. He always preferred the wild west, and was always open about it. Which in and of itself is fine. The problem was that he kept trying to make the forum become what he wished it was, by bending and stretching and skirting the rules, to incite fights and trouble and flames at every opportunity.
As far back as 2001, Drew started using a familiar tactic, acting as if he didn't understand something in order to lure someone out. Look in the recent Binky thread and you'll see him trying to do it to me, again and again.
here:
http://www.ticklingforum.com/showthread.php?p=1894687#post1894687
and especially here:
http://www.ticklingforum.com/showthread.php?p=1896754#post1896754
But that behavior dates back to the founding of the forum. Some of the earliest moderator conversations were about how to handle Drew's tactics. I mention this to point out just how much slack Drew has been given over the years.
Here's a post of his to illustrate what I'm talking about:
http://www.ticklingforum.com/showthread.php?p=30432#post30432
This is obvious bait, because Drew was an older man at this point already, he had been participating online for years and years, had read fiction, seen pictures and videos, and was clearly completely familiar with the term "Master." But he puts on his halo, blinks innocently, and asks "Oh, what does this mean." And the reason he does that, is that he can then twist your words around. Notice how innocent his first question is, and how quickly he pounces once he has a response.
But it wasn't always subtle, either. Eventually Drew had to be banned permanently from the Politics and Religion forum because he couldn't stop nakedly insulting people to their face:
12/6/04:
1/9/05:
For almost a decade, we've been discussing him, and how to deal with his various attacks and tactics, and trying everything we could think of to avoid having it come to this. But ultimately, I have to do what's best for the forum, and Drew's behavior, especially lately, has gone from being merely annoying and curmudgeonly, to being vicious, relentless, and deliberately destructive. He has targeted a group of members for merciless and endless harassment. And that will. Not. Be. Tolerated. Here.
Yet another classic example of his trend is this thread, "Have you ever been back stabbed by a friend over a girl?"
Now the initial premise of this thread looks innocent enough. A question is posed and a back story to support the thread question. Here's the issue with that thread: The two characters that he spoke about, "Jim" and "Sue" were not the actual names of the people he was referring to. He was actually speaking directly about Venray and CrystalLight. He had an issue with their friendship, again just seeming to decide that things that have NOTHING to do with him must be stopped, and decided to slam them by conjuring up this fictitious story thread.
It's easy to brush this off as a "so what" situation. But due to it being an ongoing issue for not months, but years and directly affecting user's and the forum's general ambiance, it tends to add up.
Another example of his harassment is here, in this post he made about polyamory. Polyamory, like bdsm, is a subject that Drew70 cannot tolerate. Not only will he not tolerate it in his own life, but he won't tolerate it in others. And anyone who practices it becomes the target of his attacks. There were many threads on the subject that drew used to subtly harass people he knew practiced it, but it ended in this, when he wrote a poem naming names and making fun of members of the forum. And again, it could appear innocent, but you have to keep in mind that these were people drew had attacked and harassed. Their names are appearing here not in friendly jest, but in mean-spirited mockery. Don't forget to notice the title:
As I mentioned above, the other subject that Drew loved to harass people about was bdsm. Here he creates a thread to attack people who practice it.
http://www.ticklingforum.com/showthread.php?t=74769
But what's particularly annoying is that the user Susannah335 is actually also Drew70, using a falsely created identity to support himself. We spotted it because the IPs were identical, and once we decided to track it we were able to watch as Drew logged out one identity, logged in the other and used it, then logged out to return to being himself again. As, let's be honest, incredibly stupid and petty as that is, what's worse is that he created a whole back story of abuse to support this fake identity.
http://www.ticklingforum.com/showthread.php?p=920432#post920432
I really lack words to express my disgust.
Another well-known thread created by Mimi titled; "A Masters Creed (not for all - BDSM related - if offended, do not open)" contains only a slim cut off the top of Drew's obvious issues with those involved in BDSM. It also shows his style of managing to throw insults at others, without having to directly call someone out.
This history continued far back as well as further forward from the time of that thread's creation. Even up to him throwing shots at Redmage in a thread titled: "Unnerving your 'Lee: How do you Cause?"
Inside that thread was a re-quote of a thread drew had started a little while back, publicly apologizing to the BDSM community. Right after that was posted, drew went on to publicly retract the statement and push forward with more attempts at stirring the pot.
This thread, "BDSM kills yet another," is also a clear representation of Drew attempting to cause trouble. Even more evidence of that is this post made by Bella, bringing light to the fact that the article was dated back in February, further proving that drew took the trouble to search for this just to cause problems.
Unfortunately, since those days he has learned to carefully walk the line of our rules, to avoid getting into a situation where he could be fairly banned. So I was faced with a situation where I had to either do a difficult thing, and ban someone for their complete attitude and behavior, without a specific rule to point to, or I could continue to tolerate thread after thread, and post after post, with no purpose but to inflame the forum, attack people he doesn't personally like, and harass me in particular. Drew loved to come up with obscure points that he could use to try to make me dance around justifying myself, because it made him mad that I wouldn't let him get away with his trolling behaviors.
Here are a few more examples of Drew's trolling behaviors. None of them individually would merit someone being banned, but together they show the pattern of endless negativity and destructiveness that Drew has come to represent:
"Three more questions"
While this thread starts out harmless enough, there are clear undertones. Drew issues three seemingly innocent questions and has them swiftly handled by Myriads as seen here in his post. Now it begins to look a little shady when drew is quite obviously not content with the answers Myriads provides and pushes a bit further.
As seen in this quoted post here and even went as far as to re-post it 6 minutes later due to not receiving what he really desired. You'll see that here.
Here are clear examples of drew70's penchant for line walking. Not much to say to these threads, they speak for themselves:
"drew70's guide to successful TMF posting" Part One and Part Two
And here's further proof that Drew's desire to create chaos knew no bounds, to the point where he will even have use the the Suggestions and feedback forum to stir up trouble. This thread was created and targeted at a forum member for making more sub forum suggestions then he deemed necessary. Also relevant to this is that this was posted on the very day that Drew returned from being suspended from the forum for trolling. His very first action was to go after someone because they make too many suggestions: "Limit on new sub forum suggestions"
The list goes on and on. There literally isn't enough room or time to discuss every single incident with Drew from the past 8 years.
For a long time, I lingered over the decision, because it's such a serious one. Drew has been complaining about being harassed by moderators for months and months now, and that should tell you a lot about what was going on, and how far you have to go to get banned from the TMF. If he was really being harassed by me, and if I really was as capricious as he wanted to claim he'd have been gone a long time ago. But I let him continue to snipe at me in order to avoid looking unfair.
This recent binky thread is just too much, though. His behavior in there is incredibly personal, against me but more importantly against innocent members of the TMF whose only crime was to chew on a binky in real life, and use Internet slang. On top of that there was barely any correlation to the topic at hand. It was an almost naked attempt to stir up trouble, insult people he doesn't like, make the forum uncomfortable for them, and make things as difficult and complicated for me as possible.
Well, enough is enough. This forum was once a pretty peaceful place, without these weekly or bi-weekly flareups of threads that are carefully constructed to appear innocent while actually being mean-spirited attacks on people. And I finally felt that as the person who ultimately has the responsibility of deciding what's best for the forum (which is not a light weight to carry, or one I treat casually,) I had to do the difficult and necessary thing, and excise this infection from the healthy body of the TMF.
I repeat that I did it with great regret, and after literally years of trying to find any way out of it.
And the truth is, I've always been his biggest defender. I've had friends get personally angry at me because of my tendency to forgive Drew's faults and behaviors. But my feeling has always been that A) It SHOULD be hard to get banned from the TMF. I take great pride in what an open forum we are. And B) Drew's history in the tickling community made him deserve a lot of latitude. Drew was one of the earliest contributors to the online tickling community, once spending hundreds of hours to take the trouble of scanning images of tickling from magazines and posting them online to share. In those days Drew and I were good friends:
drew70 said:
http://groups.google.com/group/alt....=en&lnk=gst&q=jeff+drew+nice#86d83d6d618ecb74
Then this is a post I made last year in our administration forum, defending Drew from an outcry of people wanting him banned:
MTP Jeff said:
That was in August of 2007. As recently as that, I felt very strongly that Drew should not be banned.
But unfortunately, Drew has never really been able to get along on a moderated forum. When we had barely even launched, he would post on AMT and complain about the moderation of the forum. He's been very open all along about the fact that he feels there should be no moderation, everyone should be free to say anything they want.
The problem with that of course, is that the result is that the loudest and most aggressive people dominate every discussion, while more soft spoken people are ignored, or even abused. AMT proved that conclusively. The more people who started participating in the online tickling community, the more vileness we started to see. People flocked to the TMF in droves to get away from that kind of wild west, shoot anyone you want, mentality. And the success of the forum seems to strongly suggest, if not prove, the validity of that. In eight years we've gone from 800 to 80,000.
But this was never the right home for Drew. He always preferred the wild west, and was always open about it. Which in and of itself is fine. The problem was that he kept trying to make the forum become what he wished it was, by bending and stretching and skirting the rules, to incite fights and trouble and flames at every opportunity.
As far back as 2001, Drew started using a familiar tactic, acting as if he didn't understand something in order to lure someone out. Look in the recent Binky thread and you'll see him trying to do it to me, again and again.
here:
http://www.ticklingforum.com/showthread.php?p=1894687#post1894687
and especially here:
http://www.ticklingforum.com/showthread.php?p=1896754#post1896754
But that behavior dates back to the founding of the forum. Some of the earliest moderator conversations were about how to handle Drew's tactics. I mention this to point out just how much slack Drew has been given over the years.
Here's a post of his to illustrate what I'm talking about:
http://www.ticklingforum.com/showthread.php?p=30432#post30432
This is obvious bait, because Drew was an older man at this point already, he had been participating online for years and years, had read fiction, seen pictures and videos, and was clearly completely familiar with the term "Master." But he puts on his halo, blinks innocently, and asks "Oh, what does this mean." And the reason he does that, is that he can then twist your words around. Notice how innocent his first question is, and how quickly he pounces once he has a response.
But it wasn't always subtle, either. Eventually Drew had to be banned permanently from the Politics and Religion forum because he couldn't stop nakedly insulting people to their face:
12/6/04:
drew70 said:
1/9/05:
drew70 said:
For almost a decade, we've been discussing him, and how to deal with his various attacks and tactics, and trying everything we could think of to avoid having it come to this. But ultimately, I have to do what's best for the forum, and Drew's behavior, especially lately, has gone from being merely annoying and curmudgeonly, to being vicious, relentless, and deliberately destructive. He has targeted a group of members for merciless and endless harassment. And that will. Not. Be. Tolerated. Here.
Yet another classic example of his trend is this thread, "Have you ever been back stabbed by a friend over a girl?"
Now the initial premise of this thread looks innocent enough. A question is posed and a back story to support the thread question. Here's the issue with that thread: The two characters that he spoke about, "Jim" and "Sue" were not the actual names of the people he was referring to. He was actually speaking directly about Venray and CrystalLight. He had an issue with their friendship, again just seeming to decide that things that have NOTHING to do with him must be stopped, and decided to slam them by conjuring up this fictitious story thread.
It's easy to brush this off as a "so what" situation. But due to it being an ongoing issue for not months, but years and directly affecting user's and the forum's general ambiance, it tends to add up.
Another example of his harassment is here, in this post he made about polyamory. Polyamory, like bdsm, is a subject that Drew70 cannot tolerate. Not only will he not tolerate it in his own life, but he won't tolerate it in others. And anyone who practices it becomes the target of his attacks. There were many threads on the subject that drew used to subtly harass people he knew practiced it, but it ended in this, when he wrote a poem naming names and making fun of members of the forum. And again, it could appear innocent, but you have to keep in mind that these were people drew had attacked and harassed. Their names are appearing here not in friendly jest, but in mean-spirited mockery. Don't forget to notice the title:
drew70 said:
As I mentioned above, the other subject that Drew loved to harass people about was bdsm. Here he creates a thread to attack people who practice it.
http://www.ticklingforum.com/showthread.php?t=74769
But what's particularly annoying is that the user Susannah335 is actually also Drew70, using a falsely created identity to support himself. We spotted it because the IPs were identical, and once we decided to track it we were able to watch as Drew logged out one identity, logged in the other and used it, then logged out to return to being himself again. As, let's be honest, incredibly stupid and petty as that is, what's worse is that he created a whole back story of abuse to support this fake identity.
http://www.ticklingforum.com/showthread.php?p=920432#post920432
I really lack words to express my disgust.
Another well-known thread created by Mimi titled; "A Masters Creed (not for all - BDSM related - if offended, do not open)" contains only a slim cut off the top of Drew's obvious issues with those involved in BDSM. It also shows his style of managing to throw insults at others, without having to directly call someone out.
This history continued far back as well as further forward from the time of that thread's creation. Even up to him throwing shots at Redmage in a thread titled: "Unnerving your 'Lee: How do you Cause?"
Inside that thread was a re-quote of a thread drew had started a little while back, publicly apologizing to the BDSM community. Right after that was posted, drew went on to publicly retract the statement and push forward with more attempts at stirring the pot.
This thread, "BDSM kills yet another," is also a clear representation of Drew attempting to cause trouble. Even more evidence of that is this post made by Bella, bringing light to the fact that the article was dated back in February, further proving that drew took the trouble to search for this just to cause problems.
Unfortunately, since those days he has learned to carefully walk the line of our rules, to avoid getting into a situation where he could be fairly banned. So I was faced with a situation where I had to either do a difficult thing, and ban someone for their complete attitude and behavior, without a specific rule to point to, or I could continue to tolerate thread after thread, and post after post, with no purpose but to inflame the forum, attack people he doesn't personally like, and harass me in particular. Drew loved to come up with obscure points that he could use to try to make me dance around justifying myself, because it made him mad that I wouldn't let him get away with his trolling behaviors.
Here are a few more examples of Drew's trolling behaviors. None of them individually would merit someone being banned, but together they show the pattern of endless negativity and destructiveness that Drew has come to represent:
"Three more questions"
While this thread starts out harmless enough, there are clear undertones. Drew issues three seemingly innocent questions and has them swiftly handled by Myriads as seen here in his post. Now it begins to look a little shady when drew is quite obviously not content with the answers Myriads provides and pushes a bit further.
As seen in this quoted post here and even went as far as to re-post it 6 minutes later due to not receiving what he really desired. You'll see that here.
Here are clear examples of drew70's penchant for line walking. Not much to say to these threads, they speak for themselves:
"drew70's guide to successful TMF posting" Part One and Part Two
And here's further proof that Drew's desire to create chaos knew no bounds, to the point where he will even have use the the Suggestions and feedback forum to stir up trouble. This thread was created and targeted at a forum member for making more sub forum suggestions then he deemed necessary. Also relevant to this is that this was posted on the very day that Drew returned from being suspended from the forum for trolling. His very first action was to go after someone because they make too many suggestions: "Limit on new sub forum suggestions"
The list goes on and on. There literally isn't enough room or time to discuss every single incident with Drew from the past 8 years.
For a long time, I lingered over the decision, because it's such a serious one. Drew has been complaining about being harassed by moderators for months and months now, and that should tell you a lot about what was going on, and how far you have to go to get banned from the TMF. If he was really being harassed by me, and if I really was as capricious as he wanted to claim he'd have been gone a long time ago. But I let him continue to snipe at me in order to avoid looking unfair.
This recent binky thread is just too much, though. His behavior in there is incredibly personal, against me but more importantly against innocent members of the TMF whose only crime was to chew on a binky in real life, and use Internet slang. On top of that there was barely any correlation to the topic at hand. It was an almost naked attempt to stir up trouble, insult people he doesn't like, make the forum uncomfortable for them, and make things as difficult and complicated for me as possible.
Well, enough is enough. This forum was once a pretty peaceful place, without these weekly or bi-weekly flareups of threads that are carefully constructed to appear innocent while actually being mean-spirited attacks on people. And I finally felt that as the person who ultimately has the responsibility of deciding what's best for the forum (which is not a light weight to carry, or one I treat casually,) I had to do the difficult and necessary thing, and excise this infection from the healthy body of the TMF.
I repeat that I did it with great regret, and after literally years of trying to find any way out of it.
