it's... the Off-Topic Topic (it just won't die!)

His username was dev/null. He engaged in a pattern of behavior that became increasingly belligerent toward other users over time, until he finally outright admitted that he thought nobody was "worthy" of knowing what he really thinks and feels... even though he had been pretty much expressing his true feelings the whole time. Since he felt nobody here was "worthy" of him, and since his only interest in the forum was to use it as an anti-religious soapbox - even to the point of accusing me of using it as my own personal pro-religion blog, despite the fact that I only spoke in response to his attacks and have never used the forum for that purpose - we felt his continuing presence was unneeded. Sadly, even after that, he tried re-registering under several different usernames, even going through an anonymizing proxy, and posting anti-religious rants, but it was fairly easy to figure out who was under the account and just block access. Eventually he got tired of trying and (hopefully) found something meaningful to do with his life.

I think what he failed to grasp is that this is, has been, and will be primarily a site devoted to video games and mods. It's not anyone's personal blog nor is it a pulpit. If someone wants to talk about something, pretty much anything goes so long as everyone respects each other. Differences of opinion are going to happen, and certain topics will be controversial and elicit strong feelings. We have a subforum devoted to that kind of thing, but even then, it's expected that respect will be present. Intolerance - and I mean true intolerance, not the definition the news media and Politically Correct thought police use - is a real problem and is something we won't put up with in the board. I've seen plenty of it on other message boards and it tends to follow the same pattern every time. It's fine to say you believe something is right or wrong, or that someone is right or wrong about an issue, philosophy, or whatever. It's great to discuss things, and if something doesn't seem appropriate to discuss on an open forum, there's the PM system for any user to discuss anything they want with another user - again, so long as it's not used for harassment.

What we don't want is to have what starts as a discussion degrade into personal attacks, hateful arguing, intimidation, etc. For example, if Joe User belongs to the Cult of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and Jane User is a devout follower of Cthulhu, and Joe says he doesn't believe in Cthulhu, that's one thing. If Jane says the Cult of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is nothing but a bunch of meatball-eating fork salesmen in return, that's crossing the line. If, however, the Cult of the Flying Spaghetti Monster's Sacred Cookbook states "Thou shalt eat meatballs and sell forks and do nothing else", then Jane is technically correct, but is being disrespectful in how she's speaking to Joe. It is OK for Jane to state that she doesn't like the teachings of the Sacred Cookbook and disagree with Joe, and move on from there.

That last point is the most important one - that people move on past their differences and respect each other. If they can't, we'll step in and break it up. If it continues, then we'll have to take necessary steps to keep things civil. We don't want animosity breeding on a forum that's devoted to having fun playing a video game mod. Normally we don't have problems like this, and the only things we have to ban are spam bots and the occasional script kiddie that's tried to hijack the site. We'd like to keep it that way. Doom - Thumbs Up!

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