Who's been perma-banned from BF and reinstated??

I was, then I sent a message to the Pope (C2M), then I had a series of long emails with The Rookie, then I was reinstated, then I farted upwind, then I was banned again, then I decided to stop pounding my head against the wall.

 

I am still a member in good standing but I got really tired of things and have not been there for a while. I could go on your behalf if need be. Otherwise, create a new account and let the staff know who you are and they can probably reopen the old one.

 

I think I got banned and may have been reinstated. A while back I swung by without trying to log in and noticed my name wasn't in italics any more, and my custom title had gone. The only reason I know of that would cause that to happen is a ban, although if they banned me it would have been months after I updated my signature to say I was taking a break. Kinda funny to think that I might have been banned months or years after I stopped posting, and didn't even notice for months or years after it happened.

 

I think your ban has been lifted. You are ranked as a newbie but that's likely due to the upgrade a while back. Still says you have >11,000 posts and high reputation.

 

Maybe an upgrade would have changed my custom title and turned me back to regular letters. If I recall the final update to my signature, to say I was taking a break, was in August 2013. Funny to think of a 13-year-old account with north of 10,000 posts being considered a "newbie".

 

Just logged in (took me a couple tries to remember my password). Still a member though was listed as a nubie. My profile was basically unchanged and I even had a message. Didn't spend any time really.

 

Curiously the reason I gave up on the place was the quality of conversation, and the people who would reply to a post in a way that made it abundantly obvious they hadn't read any part of it. If I recall the thing that made me decide I was done with it was when I'd written a post essentially saying "this is why I think X is true" only for some idiot to reply saying they couldn't see how I could possibly claim X wasn't true because....

I drifted back through as a guest a while back and found the quality of conversation wasn't much better. I vaguely recall some guy parroting a load of conspiracy theories and being countered from all corners with rising levels of derision, but most of the opposers were on coffee break or banned, while the guy posting the silly drivel wasn't. It gave me the impression you can post whatever garbage you want but you're not allowed to point out that what someone else is posting is garbage.

For a short time I was seriously tempted to troll the place with a sock account, making all sorts of wild and silly claims based on Scriptural silence, but then wondered how many people might take it seriously.

 

It's about the quality of "discussion" you can expect on social media, albeit without the overt insults.

 

I'm surprised I never got myself banned while I was active but somehow managed to get away with things that it seems would have got others banned.

 

If you look at the quality of intelligent, honest people that have been banned...

 

... and now I feel left out

 

This for me as well, although given the state of the place I haven't particularly cared to look back.

 

The interesting thing is that there is no possible explanation for the way things played out that don't involve a catastrophic failure of judgment somewhere along the line.

Either they appointed a huge number of staff who weren't fit for purpose, or they got rid of a huge number of perfectly good members because, well, why? I don't see any other way of seeing it. Unless someone wants to argue that so many people were once worthy of that level of trust and all of them went irretrievably off the rails, which seems about as plausible as Elvis going to meet Lord Lucan to take Shergar out for a ride.

 

I was put into the bad books when they made a concerted effort to get rid of apothanein_kerdos (which they did), and I wrote about it publicly with him and markedward on some site about how it was something like agenda driven, they couldn't recognise orthodox theology, etc.. Obviously, they made a bad judgment call.