So, this is new.

My recent enforced absence from The Classic Battletech Forumshas caused me, through a somewhat tortuous and roundabout path, to have the idea of creating my own Blog. As the aformentioned ban remains(pathetically) one of the central issues of my life at this time, I might as well start by describing how it came about.

ClassicBattletech is a moderated forum, meaning, of course,that it has a hard-working and dedicated (but completely unpaid) staff of moderators that enforce the rules. actually, I used to be one of them, but retired some time ago. 

Actually, that’s not strictly true, that’s just what I tell people. You see, I am, in the words of John Adams, obnoxious and disliked. I have a tendency of rubbing people the wrong way, especially online, where my quirky sense of humor lacks the subtle tones of my voice to prop it up. I’m also somewhat short-tempered, a fact I’ve been wrestling with most of my life but managed to get mostly under control.

So, at some point, I left the service of the CBT/Modstaff. I actually thought I left on somewhat good terms, but I appear to have been wrong. A minor bungle sometime back got me a not-Warning. I said to someone that I had “caught him in a lie,” which is a somewhat obscure phrase that I had heard once in my life and believed to mean that I had caught him trying to pass himself off as knowledgeable in a subject that he had not researched. The Mod staff accurately determined that the statement might have been taken to mean that I thought he was actually lying or a liar, which would have been mean and unfair asideof simply violating the rules. The post was edited and the matter forgotten (actually, I forgot it, I am well aware that the moderators have a secret vault where all my past misdeeds are recorded for future use.)

Now, this wasn’t an actual Warning, it was a Friendly Reminder, and was never fully or Officially upgraded to a Warning. I did get one Warning though. I told incredbil that he has a reading comprehension problem. Apparently that’s insulting, but he does. He reads things and doesn’t understand them. Regardless of why he does that, it’s a reading comprehension problem.

After that, it starts to get a little weird. Up to this point, the Moderators’ actions have been friendly and restrained, but then the oddest thing happens. In a thread that no longer appears on CBT, for no reason I can imagine, one of the moderators called me out. Four days after the last post on the thread, he made a  post that was ostensibly aimed at “calming down” a situation that  might have become a flame-war. Now, you and I (and the moderator in question) know that flame-wars don’t take any four days to get started, and besides he made some insulting insinuations about me. Naturally, I got a little torqued off and stupidly, on a public forum, asked him what the hell he was doing.

Some thirty or forty seconds later, I deleted the post, replacing it entirely with the word “withdrawn.” At that point, the moderator who started the whole thing banned me for a week.

That was a rather harsh switch from friendly and official Warnings. Unusually severe treatment following a confrontational post from a moderator (who, himself, did the banning.) Nevertheless, the Admins seem to have backed him up.Why, I don’t understand. They never saw the post. It was deleted before it could be moved to the Moderators’ Evidence Locker of Doom.

At this last turn it gets really bizarre. Out of the blue, I am banned for a month for a supposed violation of rule #2. Now, rule #2 is the anti-trolling rule. If you’re posting just to be confrontational, it says. And I wasn’t. If I wanted to be confrontational or insulting, I’m much better at that than the moderators appear to imagine.

Sadly, I can’t show you the posts in question because they’re no longer publicly available, having been pre-emptively deleted to keep their “confrontational” contents from  causing a stir. At the moment, I believe you’ll have to take my word for it that I was being as non-confrontational as I know how, didn’t insult anyone, etc. etc.etc.

So I don’t break any rule, and I’m banned for a month. And to compound the problem, the Admins are all too busy (or on vacation or something)to address the issue.

So I’m just going to serve out the remaining 11 (or so) days of my ban and then restrict my posts to RP and articles until I can get this thing fully hashed out with the Admins. From what I’ve been getting so far, it seems rather unlikely I’ll ever be treated fairly.

That seems like enough for now, actually.