A free forum you can't trust
If you look at the ProBoards assistance forum, you will see constant requests from admins of messageboards asking why their sites were yanked. ProBoards has a "section 25(a)" of its terms of service which states the following:
WITHOUT LIMITING ANY OTHER PROVISION OF THIS AGREEMENT, PROBOARDS RESERVES THE RIGHT TO, IN PROBOARDS' SOLE DISCRETION AND WITHOUT NOTICE OR LIABILITY, DENY USE OF THE WEBSITE AND/OR SERVICES TO ANY PERSON FOR ANY REASON OR FOR NO REASON AT ALL, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION FOR ANY BREACH OR SUSPECTED BREACH OF ANY REPRESENTATION, WARRANTY OR COVENANT CONTAINED IN THIS AGREEMENT, OR OF ANY APPLICABLE LAW OR REGULATION.
This angry-looking piece of legalese has been the death of more forums than I can count. If they want to, your messageboard can be junked for no reason at all. Some people have made claims that their sites were shut down because of the content in off topic forums the ProBoards wanted them to delete. I have no idea how truthful those claims are, but it seems like if you want to run a forum where you care about relying on the long-term online survival of the information on your forum, ProBoards is not the place to go (unless you backup the board constantly). Which means that ProBoards is the least-optimal platform for a Wikipedia-criticism forum ever. And that stinks because ProBoards has a pretty decent design, and I liked using it.
The whodunit
We still don't know why Wikipedia Sucks! was killed....angry Wikipedians, people who hated Rome Viharo being on the site, certain users of WO-MB; all of that and more are possibilities. I have to say that Greg Kohs claiming that there was "....plenty of defamation... libelous content, to be specific" speaks volumes. It should be said now that it wasn't my board; Mutineer set it up, Eric Barbour showed up before I did, and it went on from there. Killing the site didn't help; it just revitalized auggie's Wikipedia Review and it allowed us to form a new board in a safe location.
Gregory Kohs has to be the prime suspect. For a supposed Wikipedia critic, he sure seemed happy the site went down the drain. We were absolutely killing his site, Wikipediocracy, doing better criticism, more often, than his site has managed these last few years. So that must have stung. But not more than the fact we highlighted the many ways he continues to make the task of being a Wikipedia critic real hard work, as we keep having to explain to our intended audiences that he's not with us. Such is the character of the man, he has still yet to simply say "it was not me". He prefers to act the fool, to wind us up, to make it appear to his remaining loyal subjects, all two of them, that he is still the only guy in town, by virtue of his hypocritical Lordship over that domain. He's not. To those of you stupid enough to continue to back this person as someone whose ethics and methods you can get behind for the greater good, even if it is by just posting on his site as a mere member and nothing more, I call on you to have a fucking word with yourself. The entire internet is onto him, not just the Wikipedians. They know what he is, why he is involved in this cause, and more importantly, how he goes about it. And they do not like it. Why would they? And rather cutely, he seems to think everyone who is wise to him and calls him out, is either a Wikipedian or a former Wikipedia Sucks poster. No Greg, they're just people with eyes and a brain. I'm confident most of the remaining posters on Wikipediocracy would not have a good word to say about him if asked, which will never happen of course, because they don't do self-criticism, believing it distracts people. Who? And from what? The idea Wikipediocracy is even part of the critic movement anymore, let alone driving/leading/motivating it, is frankly laughable. And this decline from a relatively promising start has largely been down to Greg, who has managed to drive away, forcefully or through simple disgust/distaste, a broad spectrum of decent critics and interested observers, as readers of Wikipedia Sucks would have been able to easily figure out. It is so ironic that it is easier for Wikipediots to criticise Jimmy Wales than Wikipediocrats to criticise Gregory Kohs. Says it all really.
ReplyDeleteThe Dark Knight
Oh please.
ReplyDeleteEven if you didn't want to own your own hardware, you could have stood up an instance on AWS with a Drupal buildout and used Discourse. You were lazy and stupid and you paid for it.
I showed ProBoards all of the crap that Eric's been spewing over the years and laid out the nearly inevitable future of some aggrieved party showing up at their door with a subpoena.
ProBoards did what any reasonable provider would do. They excised the cancer.
JzG