Having read all the offending posts on RPG.net, that was a silly thing to warrant a *permaban*.
Oy gevalt.
Well, okay, I've got a few minutes, so I'll tell the whole story (albeit in slightly abbreviated form).
My dissillusionment with RPG.net began maybe a couple of years ago. I was getting fed up with the mods throwing their weight around, the 'cults of personality' which were springing up all over, and how people could talk shit about anyone who wasn't an RPG.net member, but as soon as they dumped on a member, the mods came down on them like flies on shit. (IE: It's okay for someone to bash friends of
mine at Chaosium, because Chaosium are not members of RPG.net... but as soon as I chime in to defend Chaosium, I'm being a dick... whatever).
Anyway, the penultimate nail in the coffin for me was last summer when my friend Brit Daniel (whom most of you may know as "Tetsujin28") on RPG.net had been suspended for a month, and during that month was killed in a motorcycle accident.
My pal Brian (Molotov) reported the incident to me, having gotten the news from close friends of Brit's down at the local game store. Brian posted a note to RPG.net about it, and after a few 'oh my god!' responses, the thread was locked by the mods.
Seems they felt that someone might be pulling a hoax, and so we had to scramble around to try and find an obituary or something. In the meantime, I'm exchanging emails with friends of Brit's from all over the world, who've spoken with his family, gotten the full story, etc. Yet RPG.net's mods still didn't beleive it.
I honestly don't recall what ended up happening to change their mind, but basically this went on for at least a few days. It was intensely irritating, and I decided at that point that my respect for the mods at RPG.net was effectively null and void.
So, flash forward a few weeks. I was still frequenting the site off and on, but becoming more and more disinterested. I was also finding myself becoming short tempered and argumentative with people on the site. Basically, if someone was asking stupid questions, or being a dick, I started calling them out.
After a few weeks of that, I decided it was better if I just didn't return to the site for a while. I sent some PMs to a few of the people on the site who's opinions I respected, gave them my email address and told them to keep in touch. That began nearly 8 months of my 'vacation' from RPG.net
Now, I'll be honest, I did return to the site off and on, mostly to sell books in the "Sales & Trades" area, and to keep up on a few threads. But basically, I was done with it.
For some reason, I still don't understand, sometime in February I think, I decided to join in to a thread on the site. That led to me starting a few of my own. And soon, I was back as a member. The few people who'd noticed I'd left RPG.net welcomed me back, and I was having fun again for at least the first few weeks.
But in the back of my head, I still came back with the feeling that if someone was being a dick, I was going to call them on their shit.
And that's exactly what happened. A thread started by a new member, stated that he was getting back into the hobby after the first time in twenty years or so, and wanted to know what games would fit specific criterion for his needs.
Some jackass comes along (sorry, can't find the thread to link to) and suggests the extreme polar opposite of what he wants. Lists games that are OOP, or haven't been released yet (when the guy said he wanted somehting he could go to the store and buy today). Mentions games like L5R when the OP wanted straight medieval fantasy (or something). Basically, being completely unhelpful.
So I call him on it. I say that the list is unhelpful in the extreme. And he writes back something which I cannot remember, but I recall it sort of implied that the guy thought he was being funny by posting the initial list, which was totally not helpful and he knew it.
To which I write in "I can only assume you're trying to be funny, because if you're not, you're a fucking idiot."
WOAH! Bad Ben!
So, I get a follow-up message shortly thereafter from a Mod telling me that I was being mean, and if I did it again, I'd be suspended.
So I told him to get fucked, I was done with RPG.net and wouldn't be returning. "Go ahead and ban me if you want, I won't be back" I think is what I said.
After that, I changed my 'location' bar to "Not on RPG.net, that's for fucking sure" and scrambled my password.
Shortly afterwards, I got an email stating that I'd been suspended for a month for being a dick (not their words; I didn't bother to keep the email).
At which point I wrote back, and was actually really insulting to most of the mod staff. I won't post the insults here, but they were fairly good ones. I went off, telling them "You may as well go ahead and permaban me if you want. I won't be returning."
And so they did.
Now, I will admit that the next morning, after the dust had settled, I sent an apology to the specific mod who'd gotten stuck with banning me. Not for the circumstances, but for my specific actions. I'm normally not the sort to fling insults around willy-nilly, but they'd pushed me to my breaking point. I was told that if I wanted to contest the ban, I could write to a specific person. I responded that I was perfectly happy with the ban, and was not interested in the slightest in contesting it.
And that, in a nutshell, is that.
I still feel a bit bad about the manner in which I stepped out. I should have just faded away and stopped frequenting the forums. But what's done is done. The guys at RPG.net are just going to keep having this sort of thing cropping up (looking over their "Trouble Tickets" forum right now, I see mabye five or six members - some of them with post counts over 2000, like I had - have been banned recently). Frankly, while the 'users' of RPG.net feel like they drive the industry on some level, RPG.net itself is pretty much seen as a 'necessary evil' in the biz. Most pros I speak to talk of the place fairly derisively, and will not go there at all.
And that's pretty much the whole story. If I left anything out, it's simply because I've given it so little thought over the last month+ that I've forgotten.
If there's a moral to this, I suppose that I just should have walked away, and not said anything. Also, never post to RPG.net if you're mad, and taking codeine for back pain.