Final Blog Post — Six Face Palms

This indeed will be my final post on this blog. I do believe I am finally finished. I know it has been a long time. For me, it was necessary and now it’s time to move on.

This blog was only supposed to be about Phoenix Rising. However, due to the Gary-Janet-Sushi-like behaviour of the S4ME Management Committee/plus some of the moderators (Hutan, TiredSam, Trish), I am going to be mainly discussing S4ME in this last post.

To that small group of losers who trolled and doxxed me before I stepped down from Phoenix Rising, you might want to think about growing  up and getting a life, not ruining websites, and not harassing and bullying people. Did your stupidity really help Phoenix Rising? I’d say no. Really, try to get the real picture of circumstances before you jump to unfounded and bizarre conclusions.

I really miss Bob’s contributions on the forums and it is such a shame that he believed that the only choice he had was to end his life. It’s so tragic and his death was the result of the deplorable way the medical system treats patients with ME.

When Bob passed away, Adrian un-banned Valentijn without even consulting the other committee members. Adrian did so because he felt that because Valentijn worked so closely with Bob, she ‘should be with us’.  This just brings home the fact that she should have never been banned in the first place.

I really miss Valentijn’s honest straight to point voice on the forums. There was a reason she had the most likes on Phoenix Rising. Even though Valentijn hasn’t posted there for over three years, she still has the most ‘Likes’. The Management Committee on S4ME could not accept her honesty,  her straightforwardness, and any kind of criticism that she might have.  It’s a great shame that they silence any member that doesn’t adhere to their party line. A fair forum should never arbitrarily ban a member for having a strong opinion.

At the time of Bob’s death, their was a Conversation on S4ME where many members thought it would be nice to send flowers and a card to Bob’s family. I sent a private message to the Committee asking if  S4ME would send flowers from all the members as a caring gesture as many of us knew and appreciated Bob. I was summarily dismissed by Trish who told me to send flowers myself and stated that the Committee “shouldn’t send flowers because it might start a bad precedent”. I think I have already said this but how does sending flowers on behalf of members of a website to a much loved member of the ME community set a bad precedent? I think not sending flowers sets a really bad precedent and it’s a crappy way to treat a grieving family. Condolences mean a lot and condolences on behalf of a community means a whole lot more.

S4ME is an excellent website to find science-based discussions related to ME. I must say though that there are a few members who post silly one-liners in an attempt to inject humour into threads. This is really annoying because it takes the thread off-topic and makes threads much longer than need be. Unfortunately, this kind of thing is ignored because one of the moderator’s is the worst offender.

The regular members make S4ME an excellent scientific platform. I have to say that Andy puts forth a great deal of effort in posting relevant and interesting threads.

On the whole, in the short time that S4ME has been in existence, there has been poor , inept moderation and poor decision making by the committee/moderators and a hell of a lot of moving of the goal posts which has resulted in many good members becoming lurkers or leaving altogether. Any strong voices of dissent are removed via banning or silenced with pre-moderation.

S4ME initiated pre-moderation for any threads related to Jennifer Brea.

What a load of bollocks. The beauty of threads is that you can take your time reading them even if the threads are ‘fast moving’. If members are focusing on ‘personal and forum-wide criticism’ then that is taking a thread off-topic and those posts need to be removed and the members doing that need to be reminded not to. Presently, S4ME has seven moderators and that is more than enough to deal with loads and loads of reported posts. If seven moderators can’t deal with a few problem threads, then they simply have no idea what they are doing or have some agenda to control the conversation related to Jennifer Brea or they are just outright lazy and don’t want to moderate effectively. I offered to give my knowledge regarding moderation and again I was summarily dismissed with ‘let us figure it out ourselves’. Very early on, I decided to step away from offering assistance due to TiredSam’s behaviour. Unfortunately, they haven’t figured how to moderate a forum properly and fairly, and I am not sure they ever will.

They have also started moderating the covid19 threads just because of naughty members discussing politics. It seems that the number of threads requiring pre-moderation due to regular members breaking the rules suggests a lack of respect for both the moderators and the rules. It is hard to respect inconsistent moderators as well as inconsistent rules. It’s only going to get worse and get to the point where members start resenting lazy moderators pre-moderating threads rather than doing their jobs.

You can’t have a ‘robust’ conversation when members have to wait hours for their posts to appear or have posts edited at the whim of the moderators. If a few members are causing issues on threads (and this appeared to be very true on the Brea threads), then it’s better to put them on pre-moderation and view their posts rather than punishing the whole membership. This kind of control does not end well. Most forum managers understand that pre-moderation of threads can eventually ruin a forum.

To make matters worse, moderators are breaking the rules themselves with things that ‘need to be said’ and then excusing their behaviour because they can remove the content later themselves. They also don’t get ‘moderated’ for breaking the rules. This is an extremely bad example to set. If you expect members to follow the rules, then they must follow the rules themselves or they are abusing their moderation powers.  On S4ME, moderators actually admit to breaking the rules.

Dear Trish, you have no freaking clue how a moderated forum works and it’s wrong to break the rules because you know you can remove your statements later. Of course you have your own opinions about a lot of things but if you are using your moderator permissions to the remove the rule-breaking comments you make, then you aren’t exactly posting ‘not as a mod’ are you? Just because you say you aren’t wearing your moderator hat when posting doesn’t mean a thing to most forum members. As a staff member, you wield a larger stick than non-staff and what you say can sway forum members and it does matter what you say. Moderators have more power because they can basically censor any member they want via pre-moderation or banning. If a member wants to remain a member and to be able to post freely, they have to do what the moderators say even when the moderators are clearly breaking the rules and their moderation makes no sense. It’s the old saying, “Do as I say, not as I do” for these people.

And the award goes to:

As I have already written in another blog post and in this post, it appears that S4ME has no checks and balances because staff break the rules whenever they want, staff don’t have any consequences for breaking the rules, and when the staff do break the rules, they all stand together in solidarity and the conviction that their choices and actions are right and good.

It also seems that the ‘No Personal Attacks’ rule doesn’t apply to members that aren’t present on the forum.

This shows how they don’t understand moderation. The above post doesn’t make any sense. ‘Criticism’ is worlds away from a personal attack which is what rule number one is about.  Obviously, members should be able to any criticize public figure if they don’t like their actions. The rule states:

Rule 1: No personal attacks or public accusations
While vigorous discourse and even disagreement is to be expected on a forum, it is not appropriate to insult other forum members or attack them on the basis of their characteristics or motivations. Public accusations against other forum members are also not permitted, as they distract from the discussion and can escalate a situation. Disagreement should focus upon the arguments made, not upon the person making those arguments.

Why should the moderators interpret rule number one ‘more loosely’ just because Jennifer Brea said she wasn’t going to participate anymore. A rule is a rule and it must be clear. You need to either apply a rule to all members or not have the rule at all. There have been other members who have said they won’t be on the forums because they are taking a break. Does rule number one get more ‘loosely applied’ to these members?

Some members do not like the fact that Jennifer Brea was making definitive statements about the cause of ME and there should be no problem in voicing that (and many did). Really, the stupid comment about rule number one was not necessary and if members were attacking Jennifer Brea related to characteristics and motivations, then rules should apply because she was still a member. Let’s move the goal posts way further down the field until you can’t see them anymore.

As an aside, Hutan has posted moderation edicts that make no sense previously. I suggested to the Management Committee near the beginning that Hutan appeared not to have a good grasp on moderation and she wasn’t suited to make moderation decisions. So what do they do, they make her ‘Lead Moderator’!

I see where they have also finally banned the use of links in signatures. It took them over a year to decide this. I had this blog link removed from my signature a year prior to this new policy taking place even though they stated they wouldn’t remove it until they had decided about signatures.

Again, another example of poor moderation and not having a grasp of how to find and deal with advertisers. Not allowing signatures also shows a lack of trust of the members. It’s a shame that members can’t link to their own blogs or advocacy sites and so on. Bad links, advertising links or links to inappropriate material was never a problem on Phoenix Rising. It’s very simple. If you find such links, you remove them and contact the member. If it is an advertiser, they should be banned as a spammer. How much offensive content were members linking to — kiddie porn, racism, advocating murder … ??? I doubt members were linking to any offensive content, why would they? I very much doubt that there was even a problem with links and they were just using that as an excuse. Why not just disallow signatures in the first ten posts which would get rid of any spammers. How much lack of trust, paranoia, and control does the Committee have to have. They have a reason now not to want my blog linked to in any signature because I mention them and their abusive behaviour.

Talking about paranoia, they banned Mark without contacting him when he did absolutely nothing and it was for a paranoid reason.

I think that like Phoenix Rising, the staff of S4ME have also engaged in privacy breaches especially related to personal data as defined by the GDPR. The GDPR states that “personal data must be collected for specified, explicit and legitimate purpose and it must not be further processed in any manner incompatible with those purposes“. For example, you can’t use private data like an IP address for the purpose of publicly identifying a person. You can collect IP addresses for the purpose of forum administration (privately identifying members, looking for duplicate accounts, looking for spam, software logging purposes etc). I know that IP addresses were used by the staff of S4ME related to purposes incompatible with the stated use. You also shouldn’t use IP addresses to ‘dox’ people. As a reminder doxxing is publicly exposing somebody using private information. The Management Committee of S4ME has breached the GDPR as well as engaged in doxxing as evidenced by a thread titled ‘Kelly M’ (even though they got it all wrong). I must say that’s not very professional. Methinks there might be a thread that they should remove lest they get a wrist slapping or worse from the IOC.

I am going to end my comments about S4ME here.

As for Phoenix Rising, there isn’t much to see there except tons of woo woo. Hip has posted to say that Phoenix Rising’s email account might be suspended if people keep sending emails to their spam folders. Oh dear!. Maybe they should look at the default behavior of the software. I have nothing to say about the present moderator’s on Phoenix Rising as they seem to be doing okay.

At some point in the future, I will likely remove the blog. I still get visitors so will leave it up for at least another year. It really does serve to exemplify how not to run a forum which might help moderators in some way, or maybe not.

Best wishes to all, except Sushi. I can forgive all except for Sushi because what she did was unforgivable.  During the time that this blog has been published, I have learned some very troubling information about Sushi from different sources. I believe I am right to label her as a snake in the grass and nobody should trust her. I can totally forgive Gary and Janet because they are both idiots and I feel sorry for them that they got totally suckered by Sushi and a few other trolls.

I’m done!!!

Wait!!!!

Except!!!!!

I suppose I should come clean now. I do belong to S4ME and have been a member in good-standing for at least five months or so now. It just shows how bad they are at vetting new members. Scramble all you might moderators of S4ME, I doubt you will find my account. Try not to ban innocent members by mistake which you seem to have a history of doing.

Stay safe!!!!!!!!