Getting scr**ed over on ePlaya « Thread Started on Mar 18, 2006, 7:57pm »
Posted in a private message by me to Spanky, the admin for ePlaya. Yes, I'm p***ed off, why do you ask?
Quote:
Could you please confirm the fact that I (Dustbuddy) and another user (HughMungus) are not posting from the same IP address? Also, that our IPs correspond to ISPs that are thousands of miles apart, meaning that we couldn't possibly be the same person? Given the IPs at the bottom of our posts, this is a simple matter of going to the Arin whois page, cutting, pasting and checking.
Currently, both I and HughMungus are being libeled by a user who calls himself Rockdad. Libel is, of course, illegal everywhere in the United States, meaning that these actions on the part of Rockdad are in clear-cut conflict with line 5 of the "Expected Behavior" section of the ePlaya Community guidelines. To be specific, I am being accused of being HughMungus' sock puppet, which I most certainly am not. I have asked one of your moderators, Spectabilis, to confirm that my IP and HughMungus' IP do not match, and have gotten nothing from him, to date, but a good stonewalling along with a little whining from him about the fact that I savagely teased the person I was being libeled by, about the ludicrousness of the accusation.
I live in the Chicago area. HughMungus lives in Reno, Nevada. How could we possibly be the same person? For anybody who can see those IPs with his own two eyes, the accusation isn't just wrong, it's laughable, but of course, most users can't do that, a fact that Rockdad has been capitalizing on, as he has fabricated evidence to support an accusation which you should be easily able to see is without merit.
Fabricating evidence is something that Rockdad has been doing a lot. This all began on a Conspiracy Theory thread called "A Sept 11th experiment 'Trough & Beam'", started by somebody who wanted to prove that the World Trade Center in New York was taken down by a government conspiracy, instead of the two planes some thousands of people saw hit the buildings. I guess much of the population of Midtown Manhattan is supposed to be in on the conspiracy?
Rockdad spoke in support of the fellow conspiracy theorist who started this thread, in a post where he cited some alleged supports of the theory, right beneath the words "more kooks". One of the alleged supporters was one Prof.Van Romero, reported to be located in New Mexico.
Just out of curiosity, I did a search on "Van Romero" and "New Mexico", and lo and behold, Rockdad had lied about what the man had to say on the subject. Romero had never supported the government conspiracy theory, and had expressed horror over the way in which some of his off the cuff remarks had been taken out of context to support a theory he had no interest in. Further - and this was easily found - he had retracted even the remarks that had been taken out of context and, on finding his resume, I found that the man wasn't an engineer specialising in demolitions work, as some presented him to be, but a Particle Physicist. Somebody had buttonholed a flustered college professor after the incident, pressured him to comment, and got him to practice engineering without a license, essentially. All details which had been conveniently left out.
I brought them up on the thread, shortly following Rockdad's post, introducing links to relevant news stories, and to Prof.Romero's own homepage, specifically to the resume located on it. Rockdad had engaged in fraud in order to bolster an unusually whacky cause, distorting what another person had to say, and I called him on it, not just accusing him of doing wrong, but backing up my criticism with relevant cites and links. Rockdad's response was to say that I was personally attacking him by doing so, because my documenting the truth made him look bad, going on later (in another thread we'll get to) to argue that since I had shown indifference to the murder of thousands of Americans by their government by not keeping mum about the fact that he had fabricated a source, that I no longer had any rights. Apparently, by debunking some of the rationalizations he then posted in support of his distortions of Van Romero's comments made me an even worthier target of defamation, according to Rockdad.
The sockpuppet accusations began shortly afterward, on the same thread, and persisted, leading me to joke about the absurdity of the situation in this thread. Which Spec (who had been dead silent while I and HughMungus really were being personally attacked, libeled and defamed by a crank who was angry about the fact that his crankery wasn't seeing as much support as he wanted it to) then whined about, which makes sense, I guess, because joking about the fact that one has been defamed is oh so very much worse than actually defaming somebody? Rockdad then entered the new thread to continue the libel, bringing a few of his troll friends with for support, bringing us to the present.
I have asked your moderator, Spec, to please vouch for the fact that my and HughMungus's IPs don't match. Spec has refused to respond to this request. Somebody has defended this by saying that you have refused to allow the moderators access to the IPs of those posting, leaving yourself the only person who can verify that those IP addresses very clearly don't even come close to matching. If this is so, would you please make an appearance in the "HughMungus, I need some advice" thread, and vouch for the fact that I and he are not the same person.
My apologies if, as I suspect might the case, the mods can take care of this themselves and there was no reason for you to be bothered, but I had to make sure that I didn't leave any stone unturned. If I do not see a reasonable level of support in this from the ePlaya modstaff, however, I will have to take care of that myself. Given the limitations of the resources available to me, the way I can resolve this is not going to be as good for almost any of those involved as the way you can resolve this. This is not a threat, this is reality.
My leaving myself in a position of being subjected to public ridicule for something that I didn't do, just because I talked back to a crackpot, is not an option. As much as I would regret having to go this route, if my rights are not upheld, I will make use of a Google account I set up last night, and prove my location (Chicago area) and my IP by posting an account of the whole travesty to alt.burningman, crossposting it to news.admin.censorship and maybe a few of the alt.sex groups, with the url of the threads in question included in the post. alt.sex? Why not? I'm getting s***wed, am I not? I'll then link to the "original copy" page for the post, as soon as it appears in the DejaNews/Googlegroups archives, from the relevant threads on ePlaya and the "Travel to Burning Man" board.
This will wipe away any doubt in the mind of any even remotely reasonable person, as to the fact that I am clearly not posting from Reno, Nevada (where Hugh lives) or any place remotely close, but it will have other consequences as well, ones you may not like as much. Usenet being what it is, my posting a link to ePlaya there is likely to bring a wave of spammers your way. But to leave those linkbacks out would leave me in the position of posting undocumented material in a public location. This I will not do. If this should work a hardship on your staff, please do keep in mind the refusal on the part of that same ePlaya staff to make this step unnecessary by verifying the IP address discrepancy, something that both I and HughMungus have already publicly requested, repeatedly, only to get stonewalled, leaving me with no workable alternative.
In order to clear my name on my own, I'll have to reveal my specific IP address and the identity of my ISP to the general public. Conspiracy theorists, like paranoiacs in general, are not noteworthy for being good sports and taking their defeats with good grace. If I am forced to take this step, the staff of my ISP is likely to be bombarded with abusive phonecalls and faxes, enough to shut them down for a day or two, if the past performance of the Internet's lunatic fringe is any guide. If this happens, or worse, the refusal of the ePlaya staff to take reasonable action is something that the staff and possibly the highly inconvenienced and deeply p***ed off users of (name of primary ISP deleted) are likely to take very, very personally, and they're going to know exactly which site to blame, because I'll tell them.
I'd rather not have to go there. I'd rather not have to even be writing this letter. I really am a nice guy, but I am not a doormat, and as I have already said elsewhere "enough is enough". I should not have had to fight this long and this hard to get a reasonable, fairminded and adult response, when the facts of the matter are this clearcut. I hope you log in today, because unlike some people in California, we take the concept of giving one's word pretty seriously here in the Midwest. I gave my word that one way or another, proof would be presented today.
If I don't see reasonable action on this complaint by the time midnight starts to approach (that's 10 pm, your time), I'll have no choice but to continue with the plan B that I just laid out for you. I'd prefer not to do that, and if I do, I hope the worst doesn't happen, but if it does, don't expect me to apologize for the inconvenience. I have jumped through hoop after hoop, trying to find some workable alternative to going this route, getting no cooperation from your staff, and eventually one does say "enough is enough".
Where we go from here is up to you. I'm done playing.
We'll see just how much the truth counts for, on the "new" ePlaya. I'm guessing that it doesn't count for a d**ned thing.
Re: Getting scr**ed over on ePlaya « Reply #1 on Mar 19, 2006, 7:57am »
What a surprise. I was right.
I debunked the "you are Hughmungus' sock puppet" accusation by making this post on Usenet, pointing people in the direction of the origination IP line, an IP lookup page and cited the results they find. I'm in the very general vicinity of Chicago. HughMungus is known to live in Reno. End of accusation?
You'd think so, but not really. All that happened was that one of the mods - you know, one of the people who's supposed to be raising the tone of the discussion - screamed and wailed about how I was abusing the community by defending my own reputation, and then made a sock puppet accusation of his own. The time, I'm supposed to be some guy named "Observer". Oh, and Traveller - I'm supposed to be you, too and we're both supposed to be Dr.Cliff, who is supposed to have created this board as part of an evil plot to destroy Burning Man, by spamming his own board. Or something like that. At the rate things are going, I'll probably be everybody by next week. God willing, I'll be somebody with free airfare to Florida and I'll just be able to go hang out on the beach, and forget that any of this ever happened.
Observer has not specified where he lives, so the approach I used in proving that I wasn't Hugh won't work this time. Traveller is a fellow Illinoisan, so I don't know what I'm going to do with that, other than say sc*** it! I mean like, why bother? No matter how many times I clear my name, somebody will just set up another accusation and it'll never stop.
I washed my hands of ePlaya and walked away. I don't know why you guys link to the place. I have never seen a forum where the politics were this crazy and this dirty.
Re: Getting scr**ed over on ePlaya « Reply #3 on Mar 20, 2006, 8:44pm »
I saw. Green Tortoise? Good choice, I guess. From all I've heard, they have a lot more of the spirit that made Burning Man what it used to be, than ePlaya does. I just wonder if that still matters.
If you've been following the drama, Spec has now admitted that I, you and whoever else we're supposed to be doesn't live in Reno, Nevada. We're supposed to be living in Olympia Fields, instead. He tells us that his IP lookup told him that.
Just for laughs, let's take a town I actually DO live somewhere near. Which one? Let's just pull a name out of the air, for no good reason at all: GENEVA. Now let's take a look at how far somebody would have to travel from there to get to this Olympia Fields place, supposedly just to drop by the library to pretend to be somebody else, or something like that.
Distance travelled: 59.1 miles Time required: 1 hour 24 mins
Far enough for the local accent and architectual style to noticably shift. Far enough that I had never even heard of the town until our good friend Spec had mentioned it and I looked it up on a map.
If you go to the thread and look at Spectabilis' postings from before I broke down and did that Usenet post, putting my ISP at risk for harassment, while he doesn't come out and say that I'm HughMungus, he definitely implies it. Note the way in which he talks to me, Hugh and Rocdad like we're two people, instead of three. I put my post up on Usenet, point to the IP address, and Spec gets caught in the act of playing along with a wrongful accusation. Shouldn't that cost him a little credibility? Wouldn't you think it would? But it didn't.
All that he had to do was come back with another bit of BS and express it with enough assurance, and like good little robots, the people on ePlaya played along with it, as if they had never been given any reason for skepticism at all. There's a line I heard somebody use for this: "amnesia on demand". It fits.
I've been trying to get some feel for what the Burning Man experience would be like, before getting too heavily invested in it. When I see people laughing and winking at somebody's decision to engage in academic fraud and libel, and screaming in outrage at the decision of another to uphold the truth and defend himself against that libel, I think I've found my answer. It's not the answer I wanted, but at least it's an answer that saved me from wasting hundreds of dollars on what would probably have been a pointlessly dismal experience. Dr.Cliff is right. Whatever Burning Man might have once been, it is dead. When one sees this kind of behavior from a moderator, what hope is there for the community he is moderating? What kind of leadership is it seeing and what kind is it asking for?
I hate to have to cut and run on you guys just a few days after registering for your forum, but I don't see any place for this to go. Nothing against any of you, you seem nice enough, but I think that you're wasting your efforts on a group of people who will never appreciate them. I hope I'm wrong and wish you all the best of luck, but with ill will toward nobody on this board, I'm out of here.
Traveller Administrator His Majesty member is offline
For what it's worth, I run this board.
Joined: Feb 2006 Gender: Male Posts: 22
Re: Getting scr**ed over on ePlaya « Reply #4 on Mar 20, 2006, 10:00pm »
Sorry you feel that way about it, though I guess I can see why you would. But before you give up on Burning Man, may I offer a suggestion?
I remember you mentioning that you get into downtown Chicago a lot. Try dropping by one of Bop Camp's events. The warm weather is coming, and Liz Campanella and her friends will probably start spinning just south of Foster Beach. You don't even need to get your car. It's a forty minute trip up on the Red Line, or maybe a $20 cab ride. Url: http://www.bopcamp.com/ All I ask is that you take a trip to the beach and see what these guys are up to, and see if it looks like fun.
Even if you hate it, at least you'll be close to Argyle Street and some great Vietnamese restaurants, so your trip won't be wasted. Give it a try. I think you'll find that this is a much nicer crowd. ePlaya is just one stupid board. It's not all of Burning Man. Black Rock City isn't the place for everybody, but I'd hate to see you let a few loud jerks ruin what could be a good experience for you.
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