Super early in the morning but my ban has expired and I have a few things to say.
-Was what I did the other day petty? Yes but, much like the SpongeBob meme with the mountains of clam baby diapers, it's indicative of a bigger problem. I posted public messages that weren't even directly at me, never mind pings and DMs. On that note...
-Several mods, including Venus of the Desert Bloom, recognize the harassment and have told me to just start using the ignore option. Never had to do this in my 15 years here but here we are. I added about a dozen of the worst offenders.
-For the sake of transparency, if you're on my ignore list, it's likely for one of the following reasons:
*Threats and/or harassment via DMs.
*Calling me a liar or a con man. Disagreeing with me or my sources is fine but insulting my character is completely out of line. Trust is a commodity and if you don't feel comfortable trusting me then don't but be civil about it. It doesn't matter if you don't say it to my face because, lo and behold, my friends ping and DM me about these kinds of posts on a fairly regular basis. Some of my friends have even quit this website because of how I've been treated to give you an indication of how ugly things have been.
*If there's strong evidence that you just want to start **** and don't really care either way. This includes starting or encouraging raids (again, my friends message me about this stuff so people are unironically doing this out in the open)..
*Refusing to drop a debate after I or the thread wants to move on. When I was younger, I could carry on debates for days but I've come to learn that there's no point in that and it's honestly just plain obnoxious. At that time in my life, I was single, had virtually no social life, and only worked part time. Now it's the opposite in every regard. Married, very involved in my community, and working full time. In short: I don't have time for that ****. Even a couple of hours is super generous so if I say "let's move on" or "let's agree to disagree" and you ignore that, "opinion discarded."
*Responding to everything with walls of text. If it takes you 3 minutes to read my posts and 30 minutes for me to read yours, that's harassment. Believe me, I used to have the same problem when I was younger until a number of people pulled me aside and basically said "hey man, this is obnoxious." Breaking down information is courteous so if you get indignant that I'm pointing out that every single one of your retorts is like reading the chapter of a book, continuing to be a novelist is harassment.
Hope that clears things up. Again, I like being personable and transparent on these things so I can take questions on Discord. You have a beef? Keep it to yourself or take it to DMs on Discord. Again, if you're ugly about it, onto the ignore list you go so let's keep it civil, shall we?