A History Of The Sietch/SB PM Ban Compilation and Discussion thread.

[Free-Stater 101]

This idea came to my mind when a newer member asked me about how the Sietch was founded and I knew very little myself beyond random and basic things I had heard hear and their that might or might not have been accurate.

EDIT:
I have made this the official discussion thread, feel free to divulge your story about how you came by the Sietch or what you know about the Space Battles PM ban.

(Rules)

• Please stay on topic, and don't go into any current discussion's/complaint's about the other sites, we have another thread for that.
• Try to be as neutral in your statement's as possible, I understand how their are bad feeling's with some member's about their experiences on previous sites, but please, don't rant and rave.
• If you have any theories that were never confirmed about the ban that you heard or felt inclined to share/believe, please feel free to divulge them. However, please include a statement that it is just a theory that you are inclined to believe, rather than presenting it as a factual truth. I ask this because I want this project to look professional, also keep in mind that doing things like that will confuse our new member's.
• Speaking of which, please provide as much context as you can, I will be asking the mods to speak first to provide some starting context to the newer people, but still don't assume that people will automatically know what you are talking about.
• Also, feel free to tell other member's something you may have heard about in relation to their story, but again, be professional, don't rant or rave.

Thank you all for helping with this community effort, which I hope will yield great fruit.

 

[Chaos Marine]

I "left" SB (I rarely if ever post and only login to read some of the fanfiction stories I follow) because of the eye-rolling hysteria of "Nazis infiltrating the board", along with clear breaches of mod authority, like mods demanding for the rules to be broken on other forums and then when people asked why this was being allowed, they were infracted for the "affairs of other boards are not our concern". Apparently when pushed repeatedly, the mods in question were given suitable speaking to which for all anyone knows, was barely a slap on the wrist. A secondary reason then was for some of the mods asked* I change my sig even though it broke no rules whatsoever. I got a day long bang and infraction points. They did it with another SB member as well though they banned him for a year.

*And by asked they gave me an offer I couldn't refuse and yet I did.

 

[KilroywasNOTHere]

I'm a geek wanting to talk about geek things, but my opinions and the things I had interest in discussing were constantly being shot down On SB. when discussing star wars and my views on the force I was being called a troll at best and all but a nazi at worse....over freaking star wars. Between that and the steady increase of trump derangement syndrome on SB I figured I might as well get out of dodge before I get banned or worse. Not banned as of yet, but I rarely post anything besides something on wrestling occasionally and even then I don't feel welcomed on SB because it's mainly an AEW circle jerk.

Whether I get along here in the long run or not may remain to be seen. Politics seem to be the dinner special for the area and that's a dish that's always explosive.

 

[Urabrask Revealed]

... okay. This is a bit of a long story, and I was only really present for the endgame stuff.

Broken down into the essential stuff, it went something like this:
1. Posters and mods got increasingly discontented by the hostility and favoritism shown by the left-wing aligned mods in the political subforum.

2. One mod sits down with his boss for an idea of rehabilating troublemaker posters, and is given the go-ahead. Since "troublemakers" in this case means "Whoever gets infracted a lot", this means that disproportionate infracted posters are more likely to be invited.

3. The Mass PM start and after a while people start noticing: "Hey, this is actually pretty nice! I think I will post about political stuff only here!"

4. First leak concerns: Some asshole starts raising a stink about "the filthy subhuman right-wingers not coming out to get their daily curbstombing", and the left-wing mods join in. One poster in the PM consistently refusing to improve doesn't help matters. One day he goes too far and is reported for it. The owner of SB asks the Mass PMs to stop, and is obeyed. But when asked if the ones paying subscriptions could create their own Mass PM, he gives the go ahead. Thus a second generation of Mass PMs is made.

5. Needless to say, the butthurt this caused among the leftard scum that prowl Whitehall is immensive. So they try to infiltrate the PMs and, like the wastes of space they are, they fail.

6. Now comes the plot-twist: SB has some spinoff sites, such as SV and that one anarchist site, I forgot their name. One of these sites has its owner, Horton, hatch a "brillant" plan: In order to boost the number of posters to a number greater than two, he blackmails another poster into using a security flaw in Xon, causing them to be able to log into every account they desire to and see all PMs. Said poster then took screenshots, doctored some and chopped others down to size to deny context, then posted everything on a thread and howled hysterically about "Fascist conspirators conspiring to take over the leadership of SB!"

7. Members of the PM attempted to defend themselves and were promptly censored and/or banned by the left-wing moderators. The thread quickly became a witchhunt, with several posters being harassed. The moderators failed to delete the photos, lock the thread, and ban the leaker for doxxing posters; failing to do anything in accordance to their own rules. Moderators like qygibo and Ramenth demand that the rules regarding personal messages get broken, so they can leak the list of posters who participated in the PM.

8. Posters get banned, right-wing mods are pissed and step down, everyone leaves for a discord group.

9. Eventually the idea of a new forum comes up, and it is decided that this is a pretty good idea.

10. The Sietch was created. Butthurt leftards from SB, SV, and whatever that other site was try to shit the site up by claiming it's full of malware, the posters are hyper-fascists, and the staff is biased. It's bluntly put the shrieking of assholes who can't suppress opposing voices anymore.

11. The troublemakers get banned or leave because they are weakwilled, pretend this is a victory over "muh fascism", and we enjoy a sane environment to chat in.

There's a lot more details, complete with screenshots and implicating statements by the ones responsible, but that's the basics.

 

[Harlock]

So, the infamous Private Message group on Spacebattles. What was that all about?


Well one story is that it was a conspiracy by Conservatives to subvert SB, to banish the liberals and provide assistance to conservatives to change the direction of the board and make it Stormfront MK2, where Staff abused their power to protect some people and victimise others. A place of hatred, death threats, doxxing and assorted other nastiness.

That is the narrative created by those who have an agenda to push and with more speculation than fact, so what's the other side of the story?


It dates back to Donald Trump, back when he was making his run for President and the time immediately after. To say it was a period of divisiveness and high passions would be an understatement. Political discourse had never been particularly wholesome on the forum and this situation had made it far worse to the point where trying to moderate it was taking a toll on Staff.

We were aware that there was communication between Liberal posters within the Whitehall forum and coordination between them to win debates, Conservative posters had always been something of a minority and were getting dogpiled and brigaded on a regular basis.

One response to this was to implement new and more stringent rules for the real world discussion forums, these were implemented early 2017 after a fair bit of discussion earlier. Another response was the PM initiative.


While the new NSFD rules were set up to try and limit the poor behaviour that was rampant in political debates it wouldn't do much to prevent Conservative debaters falling into rhetorical traps or being baited into breaking the rules as was a common problem. This of course made a lot of work for the Staff who had to enforce said rules.

A solution was to try and improve the overall level of debate by setting up a place where selected people could be given basic debating advice so they would not fall foul of the rules or make so many easy mistakes. Spartan was the brains behind this drive and it was not a politically motivated initiative. The goal was for three separate PM chains, one for Conservatives, one for Liberals, and one as a joint chain for both sides to test one another.

The Conservative one was initiated first as it was deemed the one which would offer the best results both for Staff and posters. It was approved by senior staff and began in late January 2017.


Spartan recruited a few Staff members to help him, those who were either Conservative or open to such points of view in order to build trust with the selected posters. The first wave of recruits was relatively small and an informal atmosphere was created.

The initial objective turned out to be more difficult than anticipated, the amount of time needed on both sides became prohibitive and efforts became sporadic over the course of the project. Overall results were not sufficient to effectively fight back and try to strengthen an alternate point of view in Whitehall. Conservative participation continued to diminish to its current low level. Certain threads remained entirely empty of different viewpoints and voices.


The group ended up becoming more of a social hangout. It was a place to chat and share opinions and views that could be debated without concerns of being labelled by speaking honestly of their concerns. As the only venue open for this and the increasing membership the PM became very large and fast moving, it became larger than some subforums and was enthusiastically embraced as a meeting place and hangout.


The PM had a very broad range of people and views, some of those participants did state views that were against SB forum rules, but not against general PM rules. One of the functions of the PM was to offer a place for people to vent their anger so they did not carry it elsewhere on the forums and direct at others.

Where behaviors or commentary went beyond a line it was confronted and challenged, PM members engaged and tried to find solutions to these problems. Sometimes with success, sometimes without.


The initial PM chain met it's end after the user Odo made a suggestion one of SB's staff should commit suicide. By that point it was clear the considerable efforts invested into trying to help him work through his anger had failed. A neutral member of staff assessed the situation and resolved that the overall task of helping improve Conservative debate had not succeeded. This particular PM was shut down and a new one designed to act purely as a social hang out with no mission brief was created instead.


The majority of content was conversational with some debating but mostly sharing stories about a huge array of subjects and experiences. It included discussions about SB, the culture there and the issues and complaints they had about it. It also included times when someone in a debate would request advice on how to proceed with a particular argument.

In terms of scandal it was underwhelming, the majority of opinions were little different to old SB in tone and colour. It was ultimately why when the situation happened the opposition had to fake a bunch of screenshots, there just wasn’t anything really explosive. All rather mundane beyond the odd angry rant.

Ultimately not much different to here, just smaller.

 

[Urabrask Revealed]

It was ultimately why when the situation happened the opposition had to fake a bunch of screenshots

Just goes to show how much at face value you should take the words of SB's representation. That is, none whatsoever.

 

[Harlock]

Whomever had access to the PM presumably had all the time they needed to look for incriminating evidence, the fact all they could find was a couple of angry people saying angry things and even then only 2-3 posts out of tens of thousands says much.

Far from being a gift it turned out to be rather unimpressive I expect, certainly not the powder keg they wanted hence the need to lie about it. I expect the other mega PMs were far more incendiary but alas we'll never know.

 

[Urabrask Revealed]

Far from being a gift it turned out to be rather unimpressive I expect, certainly not the powder keg they wanted hence the need to lie about it. I expect the other mega PMs were far more incendiary but alas we'll never know.

Yeah, it was pretty much the same, save for Odo getting angry and angrier.

God, I miss Xeno Major. That poor guy got nearly doxxed by the people he trusted on the left, and now has pretty much disappeared from the internet. He was my mentor, he taught me how to be a bit calmer. What was done to him is an injustice.

 

[Harlock]

He was a man of principle and always worth listening to.

 

[Free-Stater 101]

He was a man of principle and always worth listening to.

It's telling his last post on SB had so many likes...

Here is the SB threads in relation to the PM incident The Staff Update Post Thread and the discussion thread.

Warning the discussion thread devolves into a conspiracy/witchhunt in places, and it is long.

 

[Urabrask Revealed]

Oh, that's amusing in an enraging way. When the leak thread got deleted, another poster named ScarletMagican created a new thread with the same screeching about neo nazis taking over SB. He did not get banned for it, the thread did not get closed with a "Knock that shit off!", nah, instead the leftards of Whitehall were allowed to run their hatemobs.

 

[Culsu]

Looking back at that discussion thread, that - more than the leaks themselves - probably was why I made my inner peace with SB.com and largely with discussing political and social issues online. The shrieking lunacy at display there in response to what amounted to... slightly less than 100 people acting online the way it was common on SB.com until around 2010 while self-policing (Odo was handled swiftly, and others usually were called out pretty quick when the impression arose that they acted out of line)... that was really what broke the camel's back. The way SJW-lingo and thought seems to have infected almost every corner really just put me into reader mode, and that's unlikely to change.

 

[Bacle]

My ban from SB happened after the PM leak, but was not directly the result of it. That was the result of me posting information the mods wished to suppress, and the result of people putting words in my mouth on multiple occassions then infracting me for what they thought I meant.

I joined after the Odo incident, when it was the second set of PMs. I found the PMs to be rather welcoming, most stuff in them was pretty run of the mill socializing.

The way shit was blown out of proportion, and context, was insane. The 'discussion' thread and the way it was handled showed that there was likely collusion between SB staff and Horton's clique. Horton apparently spent thousands of dollars he'd gaslighted out of people to insert an agent in the PMs. It's widely suspected Mondor was Horton's agent, and that Horton's aim was to create chaos on SB to drive people to his own forum.

SB staff was aware of this, and were made aware fairly soon after it happened, but let things devolve anyway because many of them were biased against conservatives and wanted to let the mob howl for blood.

It showed why the PMs had been created in the first place, because the political atmosphere in SB post 2016 had become a toxic pit of Far-Left and open CCP shilling, where any voice to the right of Bernie was labelled a Nazi. At least in the PM it was more civil, and the few members who might be legit white supremacists or such were shouted down whenever they started spouting off.

 

[Lanmandragon]

The worst part was that we didn't even need mods. When Odo and co would go off the normal people shut them down. Hell we'd even tell the mods to pound sand sometimes. It was a legit place.

 

[Duke Nukem]

Sounds like it would have been fun to be in those PM's.

 

[Urabrask Revealed]

The worst part was that we didn't even need mods. When Odo and co would go off the normal people shut them down. Hell we'd even tell the mods to pound sand sometimes. It was a legit place.

Sounds like it would have been fun to be in those PM's.

It was pretty much anarchy, but the kind that actually worked. Everyone knew the rules and social things, and otherwise was free to state whatever they wanted. But they had also to expected to be challenged or get pushback on their opinions.

 

[Lanmandragon]

Sounds like it would have been fun to be in those PM's.

It was pretty cool you'd have fit right in. We had actual diversity to all kinds of it. Multiple races, gays, hell even a Muslim. So we are super bad at being Nazis.

 

[Tryglaw]

Well... I left SB over RL priorities, and when I had the opportunity to come back for good I saw how things were going, namely the PM debacle was in full swing, so I promptly concluded SB in it's current form isn't a place for me.

It's a good thing I spotted the Sietch being mentioned...

Mind you, I go a loooong way back with SB, having registered... (hmm, quick check says 2004, but I've been lurking on the forum for quite a while prior to that), way way back when SB actually was about Space Battles, that is Battles in Space - anyone still remember the amateur versus movie clips on the main page? That's what brought me to SB in the first place, and I found those browsing oBSG and oBSG/ST:TOS fan fiction published on fan pages in plain text form - talk about dinosaur era...

One could even say these were The Glory Days of Spacebattles, Where Hundreds Dozens of Servants Authors Changed Wrote Thousands Hundreds Dozens of Lighbulbs Quality Stories at Our Every Whim Regular Basis. (old-timers will get it)


It certainly didn't help that:
a. SB's "greats" largely stopped writing, or what they wrote was available in other places with less assorted hassle;
b. >Space< Battles turned into >Worm< Battles, and I could hardly care less about that particular genre, nor the many other franchises that popped up now and then, even though they could hardly be considered "proper" sci-fi (MLP, really?);
c. Site culture went from being focused on fan fiction (plus some vs debates and assorted stuff), by "live and let live" / "let's agree to disagree" but generally open-minded sci-fi fans , into today's oh so easily triggered SJW-central PC quagmire of self-appointed "Nazi-spotters".

Personally I think the rot began when the "SB is not a hug-box" rule stopped being respected, and the board culture followed the mainstream media example of being mortally afraid of actually offending anyone, with the left-wingers being most shrill as per their usual modus operandi, thus screeching the rest into submission.

 

[Free-Stater 101]

I would have loved to have been a member of SB back then, that way I could have been a part of The Sietch's creation. Sadly I was still going through my Ten Year term of being, a lurker their. (Yes I have indeed lurked off and on on SB since 2009.)

My Story about the Sietch, Me, and my reasons for coming here.

I heard nothing of the Sietch at the time of it's creation, nor the PM Ban, but since I wasn't yet a official member of the community, I guess I wasn't paying attention to event's regarding the staff.

My first realization that something was off was early this year, when I suddenly realized some of the (unknown to me) former mods were strangely absent, and had been for awhile, along with quite a few other long time member's. At first I shrugged, thinking, "Real life happens..."

But then, I also looked back and realized just how toxic the atmosphere had suddenly become in Whitehall over the past few month's. It had been bad before, but tolerable, ever since Trump was elected the more left-wing member's had steadily been taking over the Whitehall it was no big secret, but starting a year ago the behavior started flying off the rails, with even more open minded moderate being dogpiled and demonized as 'the enemy' for no other reason than disagreeing with the leftwing member's.

Eventually after obtaining my membership I was browsing SB one day and was reading one of my more favorite fics: Fallout: Autumn Morning (AU) by LightningEagle (Now known as Navarro on The Sietch) I remember being put off, because somebody had mentioned that it had been discontinued and I hadn't received any updates alerts, but as I finally found the last page of the final story thread, someone posted their that it could be found here and offered a link, the rest was history.

Moral of the story? fun adventures can be found in the most unlikely places...

 

[Basileus_Komnenos]

My ban from SB happened after the PM leak, but was not directly the result of it. That was the result of me posting information the mods wished to suppress, and the result of people putting words in my mouth on multiple occassions then infracting me for what they thought I meant.

I joined after the Odo incident, when it was the second set of PMs. I found the PMs to be rather welcoming, most stuff in them was pretty run of the mill socializing.

The way shit was blown out of proportion, and context, was insane. The 'discussion' thread and the way it was handled showed that there was likely collusion between SB staff and Horton's clique. Horton apparently spent thousands of dollars he'd gaslighted out of people to insert an agent in the PMs. It's widely suspected Mondor was Horton's agent, and that Horton's aim was to create chaos on SB to drive people to his own forum.

SB staff was aware of this, and were made aware fairly soon after it happened, but let things devolve anyway because many of them were biased against conservatives and wanted to let the mob howl for blood.

It showed why the PMs had been created in the first place, because the political atmosphere in SB post 2016 had become a toxic pit of Far-Left and open CCP shilling, where any voice to the right of Bernie was labelled a Nazi. At least in the PM it was more civil, and the few members who might be legit white supremacists or such were shouted down whenever they started I spouting off.

@Bacle I remember this. I found about this site and the drama going on in SB after you made your last post on your story thread stating your intentions to move sites. After you posted the link to the new thread on the Sietch, I saw people start smearing you on there. I saw the website called an alt-right forum, and then when I checked out the site for myself, I found that none of this was actually true. Honestly most of the people on these site are pretty moderate. If anything the mainstream left has slid so far left that many people here would have been considered centrists or even slightly left of center (traditional American liberal not classical liberal).

I was never really a political person, though I personally lean slightly conservative because of my family background. I used to be one of those "Trump Derangement Sydrome" type people until I actually started doing real research on my own (my opinions prior to that were shaped mostly from my own peer groups and teachers in high school). It sucks that otherwise rational people just lost their marbles after 2016.

Honestly my own realization of how screwed up the political landscape was when I started seeing the left-wing go so far left that they traveled across the globe and are now ironically trying to bring back things like segregation with their increasing emphasis on identity politics. As an actual Indian-American this shocks me to my core.

Honestly I tend to stay away from the politics forums like Whitehall on SB and Chat on AH as they've largely become echo chambers.