So what happend to Skatz?

[408Mike]

Let's take a break from the 408Mike ridiculousness for a moment, and I'll give you my opinionated opinion about the skatz situation.

Up until this afternoon, I hadn't read skatz much and didn't know why Scooter abruptly took the whole thing down.

Needless to say, when combining the highly abstract nature of most skatz posts and Scooter's refusal to be concise and direct, I still don't completely understand everything.

However, I believe these are the cliffs as to what went down:

- Scooter banned Jewdonk a few weeks ago.

- Some mod, apparently either blake or gay sex, undid that ban earlier this week.

- Scooter became furious about this and said that he would ban both gay sex and blake for this and other reasons that were difficult to decipher.

- Scooter was also driven to the point of further insanity by the antics of 408Mike, and feels that Mike reminds him of his own crazy mother.

- Combine all of the above, and Scooter intentionally pointed the skatz domain to some placeholder site instead of the skatz forum.

- VaughnP, who apparently owns part of skatz, put it back up on the .org version of skatz, and everyone is arguing now.


Feel free to correct me if I got any of these details wrong. I have to admit that I didn't put a lot of effort into carefully reading and deciphering all of this nonsense.

Anyway, I'm not going to go into whether Scooter was right or wrong with his actions, because frankly, I don't really know or care. I've never had a problem with Scooter, and in fact have respected the fact that he doesn't seem to get involved in juvenile troll-wars-du-jour, but rather does his own thing and beats to his own drum.

The interesting thing here to me is that this seems to be yet another situation where the powers-that-be on a forum clash, usually resulting in the ultimate destruction or ghost-towning of the site.

It happened on NWP in 2008, when many left for Boris after Vwls was demodded. It happened on Boris. It happened on DD last year. Now it seems to be happening on skatz.

This is the reason I made the decision never to have mods or co-owners on PFA.

I have come to believe that it is impossible to run a forum -- at least one where you're actively involved -- and have partners/mods doing it along with you. This is because everyone tends to have very strong opinions as to how a forum should be run, and it inevitably results in conflict and battles for control.

Think about the following questions:

What should the rules be of a forum?

Who should be banned, and what reasons are required to ban someone?

If someone is banned and another admin disagreed, can that ban be overruled?

What constitutes good or bad content?

Where do you draw the line between trolling and entertainment?

Where do you draw the line between allowing an attention-hungry poster to entertain the masses and preventing him from dominating the forum?

There are no right or wrong answers to the above -- just opinions. I have mine, you have yours, other people have theirs. The problem is when several people attempt to enforce their vision onto a forum, it inevitably pisses someone else off. And if that someone also has a position of power on the forum, it will usually not have a good ending.

When I left DD, I realized that the whole thing had been a mistake all along. Micon and I were too different, and it was just a matter of time before the situation there imploded. Even if Micon and I had more similar personalities, we would have still eventually clashed and the same result would have occurred. The only way to really have a successful partnership involving a forum is if only one person really gives a shit. That is, if one guy says, "I'll run the forum" and the other says, "You do what you want with the forum, I'm staying out of it and concentrating on everything else", that's really the only way a forum partnership can really succeed.

I made a mistake by being involved in a forum partnership on DD. When I started this site, I made sure not to repeat that same mistake. This is not patting myself on the back, but more of an admission that I fucked it up the first time and learned from it.

If I ever shut down PFA or point the domain to a Godaddy placeholder, it will because my decisions and policies here failed. It will never be because of conflict with other owners/mods. This site will succeed or fail completely as a result of my own actions and/or inactions, and that's the way I like it.

Your way of running things is absolutely the best way presuming you can pull off keeping a group of human beings in check at all times, something you have NO idea the difficulty of for the rest of the human race. I say that with respect and reverence having admin'd a few times over the years and staying in close contact with friends who own forums, getbig for example. You have to be either THE LAW or there is no law and you silently remove people in the dark and never ever answer to anyone for anything. Worked for Ron, won't for everyone tho.

Anyway, you followed the whole thing a lot more closely than I have, in spending 10 minutes reading/talking I believe you to be right, and I think you know what's up, as it is rather deliberate on soandso's part.


I am not that smart, I put two and two together in April and asked him and he told me I was right, and it's painful for me to watch and tbh, I am not.

I will not offer much of an opinion except to say that I was right about many things now proven, the more important one here being why jewdonk was banned in the first place. As I seem to be the only one who gets the man, save for the silent few (cob pike and tine) I correctly pointed out there was a deeper motive at play and that the end goal had nothing to do with banning the guy for sport and nor was the goal to win an argument.

The end goal at skatz is, for at least one person,the utopia he had written about a while back, and that is my opinion only but it's hard to refute. Skatz is a smallish and well controlled (in terms of size) group of persons who are intelligent in widely varied ways, if one were so inclined and believed in ones ideas with enough conviction to act on them, putting things into play such as we see with banning a man with a massive ego who is not a player of anyone else's rules BUT who also has a huge weakness which I am aware of and won't share here. If soandso is right, eventually this weakness will overpower the narcissistic ego and jewdonk will be all the better for it as his godforsaken ego and bloated sense of self importance just kills the man's underlying desire to be liked and wanted by others. The opposing forces drive him to drink and be depressed, but he's not beyond being helped, should he allow this to happen.

Soandso is the only person I've met capable of CORRECTLY analyzing both people and their lives and coming up with both ideas (his strength, from identifying problems with uncanny capacity-inhuman at times) and implementing them at the right time the right way etc. Druff I have seen you do things in some similar ways, though I wonder how deliberate you do them, and how much is from experience guiding you. Take jewdonk for example, you were the only one to successfully ban him without so much as a single"free marty" from the userbase, which is impressive, and it was also very well thought out. At least it seemed that way.

So, anyway, I knew a while back this was coming and it's really not by accident there is no one there to openly support him. If Sonatine's silence does not make it PAINFULLY obvious I can't do better being open, no one would believe me.

Last but not least, I have to say again it is remarkable you do without effort that which escapes all who have and will tried the same thing, but then you understand power, and wield it when appropriately, yet are never the villian and no one bats and eyelash at a single decision you make. Not that you seek approval, I can't remember you ever in fact. I study the way you do things and to be honest, I can't pull off what you do successfully by luck let alone with consistency. Chalk it up to experience or luck or just the extra intelligence giving you powers I can't perceive, maybe you are hawkishly guarding AI you created and using it just to create a forum utopia, but whatever it is, it's pretty amazing, and I believe you are the first person to successfully pull off a largely self policing community that never polices anyone that is pretty damned big. You and soandso bouncing ideas of one another, that could be really interesting, to say the least.