Shout Box Restriction

[shiva]

I am saddened to announce that Guest access to the shout box and other site services has had to be limited for the time being due to continued abuse by one former member. The continued attacks againest the staff here, as well as other members, just can no longer be tolerated, so now we here at PN are forced to restrict access to prevent continued attacks for the time being, and have joined with the other vp and fp community sites in banning this former member. In my 22 years as a community member, this is only the 2nd person to ever be banned community wide, and I personally am upset that we here have been forced to do this.

It has been the policy of this website to never ban anyone unless it was under extreme circumstances, but after reviewing screen shots of the comments after they were removed (another policy of this website), several requests, and going over the history from other websites, I just have to preserve the peace of this website.

As a admin here, I am a volunteer, just like the other admins, and I dedicate my time to help build this website, to promote our pinball passion, and to spend what ever time I have spare to help others fullfil their pinball passion. In the last year, there has been a enormous amount of time, literally thousands of hours, spent on our various sections, expanding the media section, and recently re-uploading and databasing the entire pinsimdb table archive, and all of this was done by Xenon, Nic and others as well as other staff here.

We do this because we want to, to fill a need to help others with our shared passion, and to form a common bond of our silverball addiction. There are aspects of this that sometimes can be tough, and unfair, and I have personally decided that it is unfair to myself, the other admins and staff, and to every member here to continue to spend time on this one issue, when we are better served doing what we are suppose to be doing, running this website for the betterment of all.

I suspect this issue will continue on, and we will have to handle each bit as time goes on, so unfortunately we may be forced to resrict access even more if these attacks continue.

At PN, we pride ourselves in being the most truly democratic website in the community. As noted above, we don't delete comments without preserving them, we don't ban anyone unless we really have to (instead we restrict access for a limited time, and we have a warning system in place as well now) and we accept the fact that people are different in personality, and try and work out solutions to any problems before we take action.

Once again, I am sorry to our guests for restricting your ability to use this website. To our members, I apologize if there were any problems to you personally caused by this issue. Hopefully, we will be able to restore those restricted services on a future date, and we can then all go back to doing what we love, playing, making, and talking about pinball.

 

[xenonph]

What others may not know, is the Staff here has deleted hundreds (I mean 100's) of his chat box posts that were all attacks on other Staff and members.
We have been deleting them as soon as he posts them, (I have been taking snapshots of his posts before deleting them.) so I am sure that not many people have even seen these posts.
(Which is what we were trying to accomplish.)
Give him no platform to spew his hateful garbage.

Thanks @shiva

I have been refreshing the page every 2 to 3 minutes, just to catch his posts, and delete them before anyone else can read them.
Guess I won't need to do this anymore!!
It is hard to accomplish any other work, when you are refreshing page every few minutes to check the chat box.

Hopefully he fades away quickly.
Funny he has no problem bullying the hell out of everyone, but when Stevoz said Do not feed the trolls, he took offence, and acted like he was the victim. He is a damned troublemaker who does not deserve all this attention.

Let's get back to having fun!! and enjoying the company of other fellow community members.

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

Dang, I'd no idea it had gotten that bad. Also, I was pretty gutted when I learned that one of our friends (and a wonderful author) had been targeted so chronically over the years.

Sincere thanks to you, Paul, Charles & staff for navigating these murky, treacherous waters. It sure isn't easy in times like these.

To be clear-- I'm not sure how many people realise this, but just like every coin has a flip side, it's not always cakes & pies running the most egalitarian, relaxed-rules site in the scene. Because sooner or later the resolve of the site / staff will be tested, and tested hard, and most of the time these things can be worked out, but sadly, not always.

Also maybe good to remember that ranging from the siterunner (@JonPurpleHaze), to the staff, to the regular contributors... like Shiva said, it's all volunteer effort on their parts, spending their free-time, energy and goodwill in the hopes that it will contribute to a pleasant, useful, informational platform for fellow pinball enthusiasts.

I for one am grateful.

 

[druadic]

I wondered where this went to! Amazing it takes one person to tarnish something that should be used otherwise. I saw some of what happened but had no idea who or what was going on.

Hope to see it return some day soon. Well done to all the staff.

I've known you online for many years Shiva and find your way of dealing with this silliness is about as classy as one can get. WELL DONE.

A QUICK SHOUT OUT TO JPH. THANK YOU for keeping this site up sir.