(The Spawning of BIAW)
Ol' Long Ears
(Patron/Moderator/Hero Member)
presents
The (pathetic)reason for
THE BIRTH OF
THE Bermuda Is Another World FORUM!
on: October 14, 2007, 04:27:47 PM »
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For those of you who may not know the whole story, here's the background as to what brought about the "BIRTH" of this forum (NATION) (Bermuda is Another World)and ultimately the posting of this thread.
All of us were active posters over at another forum (hereinafter referred to as BS). Recently a number of posters had observed a change in the behaviour of Mike the Admin. Many of us put it down to perhaps Mike was unhappy that the forum was changing from a largely ex-pat Bermuda-bashing forum, to a truly Bermuda-centric discussion community which was largely pro-Bermuda.
Recently Mike had taken to attacking a number of the posters, and wielding his all-powerful weight around. His attack against Uncle Elvis and the name calling was evidence of this. Then about two weeks ago, he lashed out at Mysticman for comments he made about Laverne Furbert, which many of us felt were not libelous at all, and with her being a public figure, well within the bounds of a reasonable post. I, unaware of the pitfall that lay just ahead, agreed with Mysticman, and before we knew what had happened we were in the Shark Tank.
Despite repeated PMs and emails to Mike to explain why we were tanked without warning, we were ignored. For two days we were left with no explanation or access to appeal. During that time, I had an account I used for PMs deleted without so much as a word of explanation. This only served to escalate the tension and bad feeling. This was a total over-reaction by Mike, and as sole authority we were rendered powerless. He then taunted us and made childish statements like "I'm going out to spend the day with my lovely wife. I won't be dealing with you two for a while" or some such nonsense. Because of this treatment, we said some things, that had this been handled differently, didn't need to be said, and because of that, we wound up in The Shark Tank for even more time. Eventually, Mike released Mysticman from The Shark Tank, but I got to spend another two days there at "his master's pleasure".
It was during this time, that the seeds of another forum were sown, many posters PMd us, even though we couldn't PM back, or emailed us, and said how wrong they felt this was, and how stupid and childish Mike was being. We decided then and there to create another forum, different from BS, a forum that would be Bermudian owned and operated, and run by people who love Bermuda, not by someone who made no secret of his distain for all things Bermudian. In the next few days following my release from "The Tank" we set up Bermuda Is Another World! Many of the members of BS had already given us their seal of approval while we were in "The Tank", so we felt we would have a small, but loyal following.
We made no attempt to discredit BS, we made no statements about our feelings about the administration of BS, and many of us continued to post at BS. However the personal attacks continued, with Loki getting a severe lashing over something quite trivial. Then on Friday, October 12, I made a bunch of postings to the various blogs around the rock including Politics.bm, TheDevilIsland and The New Onion to name a few, and of course to BS. My post was very discrete, and just announced the arrival of a new Bermuda forum on the scene.
The very next day, I received a message from a member of BS who, interestingly enough was not a member of this forum, informing me that the link I had posted had a typo in it, and any attempt to follow that link, took one to BS. Assuming I had made the typo when I had originally posted, I went in and made a posting apologising for my sloppiness and retyped the URL. On reviewing that post, I saw that the same action had AGAIN occurred. SMF (the software of BS and this forum) has an admin feature called RESERVED WORD in which you can state words or word groups to be caught and changed, which is how we change “f**k” to “f*©k”. It would appear that Mike had set up a reserved word for “bermudaisanotherworld” and was removing the “i” from “is”. The amended URL pointed to BS, but at that point I wasn't aware of how that was being done, I assumed it to be something internal.
I made another post (three so far on this topic), a very polite one, identifying the problem, referencing “reserved words”, and hoping that this forum was not considered profanity over at BS. Phrasing it as a “hiccup”, I asked Mike in the politest of terms, if perhaps he could have a look at this for me, and correct the problem. I went in again some short time later, only to find that Mike had deleted all three of the posts I made to the Shark Tank referencing this problem. I didn't see what the significance of that action was (silly bunny that I am). Mike is the only person on BS who can delete in the Shark Tank. No other Moderator has that capability. Mike has been caught YET AGAIN with his hand in the cookie jar. The first time admittedly, I was speculating, not having been an admin of an SMF forum. But now I know exactly how things work being an admin of this forum, and he’s knows I nailed him. Why didn’t he just correct the situation and say “Oops! - Yes system glitch!”, and that would have been the end of it. Why, you might ask? Why indeed!
I saw that Mike was online, so I PM’d him, and simply said “Why were my three posts regarding the 'hiccup' erased”? He never answered me, and eventually logged off. This again was childish and petty behaviour, much like the tanking incident, and not only shows a level of immaturity but also is highly suggestive of someone looking for revenge. These were not the actions of a guiltless person in my mind.
Then today I received a message from a regular poster informing me he had done some research into the renaming issue over at BS, and had discovered that Mike had registered the domain name http://www.bermudasanotherworld.org/forum/ click on this link and see where it takes you! I couldn't believe that even Mike would be that infantile, but sure enough when I checked it out, it was true. He has set up the domain name, with domain forwarding to point to BS. How incredibly silly. I mean we were civilized about this, we just wanted a place to call our own. We didn't trash BS (although God knows, some of us had reason to) and some us were still avid posters over there. What is this saying to those folks? I think we know what it's saying.
Well it would appear we really didn't need to trash BS after all, Mike's doing quite a fine job of that all by himself. He's single-handedly managing to piss off just about everybody. Gee, Mike - what were you thinking? Oh, I know... you weren't! Well there you have it boys and girls, it would appear we have a mortal enemy in Mike, but it's hard to have a war if you're the only one there... We are here for us Mike... we're not here to war with you, this has nothing to do with you, or your site. We are here because we love and care about Bermuda, something you never did. We want to make a difference, not just make noise, and we are CERTAINLY glad to be free of the baggage your site name brings with it. Catch all the 'mispellers' you can, they'll soon realize they're in the wrong place, 'cause there'll be nobody posting over there eventually. You had a good run Mike, but Bermuda no longer needs your anger, or cares about your point of view, you live about as far away as you can get... and I think it's time to let it go.
Hare Lewis
