I was never a "forum warrior". I think my total comments on EVE-O in the three years I have played the game can be counted on one hand. I hardly ever engaged in commenting on EN24 or TheMittani either. I think I might have written a handful of comments here or there.
Today I read a rather interesting article on TheMittani, and I wanted to ask there how the author got their nice maps together. To my surprise I got the message "You are not allowed to post in this thread."
Now, it is no secret that I am not a friend of the GSF, although I do have a certain grudging respect for them. Still, there are other people out there who have been much more offensive in their blogging and posting against the Goons. Are they all banned too?
I am operating a web-proxy through my IP, and I know of one person who plays EVE who makes use of it, but he actually likes the Goons and he's generally a rather nice guy who doesn't post very aggressively, so I doubt he would have posted anything on TheMittani which they could find offensive enough to ban this IP.
I know there are people out there who have all kinds of conspiracy theories about Goons and how they have a "secret police" and all that. While I am of the opinion that they are engaged in systematic internal brainwashing of eachother, I really doubt that they actually trace IP adresses of posters and bloggers who are agitating against them and then ban them from posting on TheMittani.
So, the whole thing is a great mystery to me.
I was considering to write an email to TheMittani staff to ask how that ban came to be, but some sort of (probably false) sense of dignity prevents me from doing that. The last thing I want to come across as is some person begging at TheMittani to be allowed to post at their site.
Maybe curiosity will win out eventually. Or maybe I just will stop caring (I did find out that everything works fine if I use my neighbour's open WiFi).
What I mostly would like to know is what it all means, and I don't know if anybody who reads the emails sent to TheMittani would even know, and if they do, maybe the reason really does have something to do with an actual worldwide Goon conspiracy.
If that were the case, I doubt they would tell me the truth :)
Then again, maybe someone has managed to go through my proxy and leave no traces while offending the moderators of TheMittani (actually the scariest thought of them all).
In any case, it's a conundrum, and I like those.
It also provided me with a reason for a rather random blog post.
Things could be worse :)
best bet is you don't have a static ip and they banned someone else who shares your provider.
ReplyDeleteThen, "banning" people from openly commenting on their site make it plain and simple, Teh Mittens is not an open and fair discourse for news on and about EvE Online, but is, in fact nothing more than a propaganda machine for Goonswarm... and nothing else.
ReplyDeleteTo be fair, it may be prudent to ban people who are just needlessly and persistently offensive. There is still a difference between censorship and moderation.
DeleteBut like I said, I very much doubt I was blocked because someone overstepped the boundaries of good taste.
Maybe I'll find a way to enquire which can bring the actual reason to light.
I am having issues with blogspot / cant comment from Chrome easily. I think its a Cache issue. Have you ruled out client-side problems?
ReplyDeleteWell, they use Disqus, and I have tried different browsers. I can comment on other Disqus based threads, and things work if I am routing through a different IP, so I am quite convinced that - for whichever reason - it is my IP that is blocked.
DeleteHm. Odd. try a different IP address? I am still not sure they care about the odd blogger (and I mean that with respect) who criticizes them. They have bigger fish to fry, one should assume. At the same time, I am still suffering from interwebs issues on blogspot with the wordpress authentication (this is Splatus, btw)
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