I'm angry right now. I want to vent, but everywhere I think of venting only seems to put my post at risk of being trashed, so I'll vent on my blog.
When you run a website or forum, like it or not, your job is to look out for people who's information you collect. If you run a message board and you have members there, you are responsible for anything done untoward to your members. The members themselves are responsible for choosing a secure password, but regardless, hacking into a member's account isn't right. So when someone who has done this to several members of a community, screwed up the forum's database, and has a history of trouble-making, I want to see that person gone for good. That is the kind of person the community doesn't need.
I'm talking about
Sonic Retro and the forumer who goes by the name
x64. How can anyone be stupid enough to let someone like this back yet again? It's also personal for me because he tried to blackmail me once. Granted, the information he had wasn't anything serious, but it was still wrong.
He is a member of
Pound Stuff. I view this group as essentially the
4chan of the Sonic scene. They make jokes that are very provocative, sometimes funny and sometimes stupid. There are few moral boundaries to much of what they do for the "lulz." It is mostly (but to be fair, not entirely) made up of anti-social people who have nothing better to do with their lives. He also played a role in the distribution of someone's home mailing address and phone number on the internet, a disgusting tactic that has been glorified on 4chan, Skype, and across some other social networks that unfortunately sometimes draw careless pranksters. Yet, he feels he has done nothing wrong at all.
I'm tired of top Sonic Retro staff members not caring about their members. If they really cared, they wouldn't let people like x64 back in! It's that simple. I've said plenty of nice things about some staff in the past, but I have very little good to say anymore. The arrogant part about it is they act like nothing unusual is going on. Now x64 is posting, and I'm just sitting back waiting for him to cause problems. There is something very morally disturbing about this in my opinion. I know some members don't say anything because they don't want to create any conflicts, and I respect that. I also realize that not everyone who associates with x64 or Pound Stuff is bad. I do feel however that something has to give. How much longer can trouble makers get a free pass just because they're able to buddy up with staff members? In the political world, that would be called "corruption."
I haven't decided yet if I'm going to continue going to Sonic Retro. I go there mainly to promote my
YouTube channel, but I could always find other ways to do that. I just wish someone would tell me up front that they too are disturbed by this. I for one cannot begin to fathom how something like this isn't viewed as a big deal.