denisdman wrote:
Boilermaker Rick wrote:
The biggest problem was that bigfan not only disliked someone, but expected you to also dislike them, and to accept that they would be gone for a long time if not forever. I tried to reason with him when there were strong discussions about creating a new board by basically saying "There are a lot of people that like the people you banned, and they want to interact with them, so eventually a decision has to be made to create a place where that is possible. We all want to stay and hang out and post here but that doesn't seem like an option". He basically took it as us trying to "force" him to do something he didn't want to do and then basically said "You'll be banned if you do it".
I think this was easily confirmed when he would rather have seen the board destroyed because some of those people were back.
There are a lot of posts in this thread that are basically telling me why I should dislike him and even some saying I should not post on his board. I agree that a lot of stuff he allegedly did to folks I like is wrong. But in some ways, folks are doing the same thing that you accuse him of. I am fine with MANY of you not liking him and not posting on his new board. For my part, my interactions with him were fine. Should that change, then I may join the parade of dislike.
Each time I did something he did not like, he gave me fair warning to cut it out. I think MANY people here pushed the envelope and baited/dared him to ban them. FF comes to mind.
His behavior towards the end was not reflective of the prior 10 years.
That's simply untrue.
I honestly never interacted with Bigfan much, as I found his posts to be unreadable, for years. However, a couple years ago I had some interaction with him in the Ferguson thread. Specifically, he created a thread threatening to ban Chus. I posted one phrase in that thread. It simply said (in response to others who had said it was way overboard to ban Chus) "Thirded. Totally overboard." That single post led me to be banned for 11 months with no forewarning and no rationale.
When I was gone, there were MANY posts about me that he posted that were completely untrue. I emailed him a couple times, and rather than replying to me like an adult, he came and posted what I wrote to him on the board... except what he wrote was always twisted or completely fabricated.
I returned last year when we were all "unbanned." At this point, despite my disdain for him, I told myself I would not interact with him on any level and it would be fine. This worked for some time, and he and I even had pleasant PM exchanges. I was even able to talk to him about trying to unban others who were banned, like Kirkwood, FF, etc.
Unfortunately, this led me to believing I could again interact with him in a respectful way... and I was wrong. I made the mistake of joining his NCAA elimination tourney and sent him $30 to partake. After a few rounds, he had clearly eliminated one of my teams which should not have been eliminated. I didn't think that he had done it on purpose, so I just noted in the thread that his teams were incorrect (as did Chus). It wasn't the least bit disrespectful or argumentative... but it led to him deleting my posts and sending me a PM threatening to ban me.
It was all downhill from there. As MANY recall, he deleted and edited posts in Rick's March Madness Tourney to try to sabotage any chances I had to win (again, to any adult, the tourney is just a "fun" thing, but it would irritate anyone if the moderator EDITED posts to change the votes and deleted others). Again, I took some jabs at him for that (who wouldn't?) but nothing out of bounds. Keep in mind I wasn't interacting with him at all... this was all his own doing.
After the board was turned over and he didn't have the ability to ban anyone, he went off the deep end. He clearly wasn't sure what he could do to maintain his power, so he started making things up about people. As MANY probably also remember, he posted in a thread that during one of our PM exchanges, I basically talked crap about Favrefan and IMU. This was an obvious attempt to try to make me look like a BACKSTABBER. Thanks to Seacrest's recommendation, I checked my PM's and fortunately still had a copy of the PM he was referencing, and I posted it for all to see. It was obvious that not only did I not talk crap about FF and IMU; I said that our COC "group" (including myself) just enjoyed talking crap to each other. Of course, there was no response from him and no remorse for misrepresenting what I said.
Finally, when he had his meltdown, he threatened to ban me, CHUSE, FF, DB, and even JBills simply because he posted a gif in response to his thread. Add to this timeline all the times he has ripped on people's jobs, people choosing to stay at home to raise kids, people's economic status, etc. and I don't see at all how you can say that people "poked" him in a way that he didn't deserve. 99% of the things I ever personally witnessed or dealt with him on were triggered by his own actions and him throwing a temper tantrum when others dared to correct his misrepresentations of them.
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Curious Hair wrote:
I'm a big dumb shitlib baby