h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Recent conversations featuring aka have been deliberately offensive and annoying to other users. Along with Saturine he has launched a personal attack on all digibox users to the extent of gloating over the fact that they were going to contact Telewest to get teh 'loophole' in their access which he claims is 'theft of service' closed down.

He campaign appears to have resulted in this loophole being shut at least for the time being.

However, in the fallout from this vandetta, I can think of no other word looking at various threads, campaign he has continued to be abusive and annopying to other users. Posting over and over the same insults, insinuations and accusations. Condemning the Digi-box users spelling. Even saying that once they were told they were only here through a loophole they should have ceased using the system as he himself did.

As you are aware I resigned my ACE and Guru status over a matter of principle and concience just under a year ago, after a long time in both positions. I still hold the fact that I was once a volunteer on h2g2 dear. I therefore find this abuse of status very unbecoming to the badges he holds and the volunteer system as a whole. I request that this issue be looked into and acted upon in a manner seen as fit and appropriate.

Addressing points in SDD's paragraphs:

1.(a) You are ignoring the fact that it was mostly the other users who were deliberately offensive.

1.(b) TeleWest taking action to prevent dna access indicates strongly(!) that "theft of service" is not merely a claim of aka's but a fact in the opinion of that company.

2. Sending one email informing TeleWest hardly counts as a campaign.

3. While bad spelling etc are not exclusive to digibox users (making it an odd basis for any such vendetta which might have existed), in the conversations I've seen (which are several but may not be all), it is the other people who have been repetitively abusive to aka and Saturnine.

4. Why is it that you want to encourage people to commit criminal acts and condemn someone who points this out? TeleWest were the ones who actually made the decision about what their service should include, not aka. Of course there *are* other people committing similar crimes on h2g2 but they would have to be reported individually. The ones on digibox just happen to be easier to report as a group.

SEF

May I remind you that this is posted on the ACE conduct case for a specific reason. aka is an ACE and Guru and has therefore agreed to abide by that code of conduct.


in relation to you points

1(a). I realise that others were offensive but that is not the issue here if they had signed up to this code of conduct I would have raised the issue here as well.

1(b). That is information I can neither confirm nor deny hence the 'apostophes'

2. The email is not the sole issue there is about 2 weeks worth of threads as well which I beleive equals a campaign

3. There is a thread were it is raised that getting rid of text peak is good reason to raise the issue of the legality with telewest a worthwhile course of action.

4. I have never encouraged anyone to carry out a criminal act. My first post on the subject actually said that as for the subject of legality that was an issue for telewest. I am merely complaining about the attitude of one ACE and guru in relation to this whore sordid affair. And as I said above I've asked for this to be looked into and any apppropriate actrion to be take nby the TPTB.

"to abide by that code of conduct"

...in the way that many of the rest of them demonstrably don't. There are some very dishonest double-standards in the way the rules are interpreted and applied. So it is possibly significant that you would complain about aka and not about all the other volunteers breaking the code all over the place. It is more significant that the staff approve of many such instances of bad behaviour while choosing to victimise some people who haven't broken the rules. If the rules are to have any credibility then there are a lot of people who should be removed before even considering aka.

"which I beleive equals a campaign"

No. To be a campaign it would have had to be where TeleWest could reasonably be expected to see it, eg lots of email, snail-mail and telephone calls to them and possibly letters to newspapers and placards outside their premises. I don't think there was even anything on ican (though it seems that hardly anyone uses that)?

Now perhaps aka could have said nothing in public and merely sent the email. However, as it was, he got to see just how many people didn't care that they or their friends might be committing a crime and were extremely offensive rather than concerned. There were no reasonable evidence-based arguments against aka that I saw, just abuse towards him. The closest thing to a valid point anyone had was in saying that some of the staff at TeleWest must be complicit in the probable crime because they had said they knew and did it too. Of course it is no big surprise that some people commit crimes from work and thus does not prevent the act itself from being a crime.

A dislike of text speak is hardly unique to aka just as the use of text speak is not restricted to digibox users. At most that could have been a contributory factor in not worrying about losing digibox users rather than the main one for reporting them. Another factor which I saw raised was that many of the digibox users are the visible trouble-makers - again it is not all of them or exclusively them.

However, once the issue of legality had been raised, any nice, honest, law-abiding people should have had no objection to restricting themselves to using legal means to access the site, such as libraries and internet cafes since some already did use these sometimes (eg for the sort of articles which might go into the EG rather than simply chatting). The people who were abusive at aka instead is very telling, just as with other such cases.

I'm not going to drawn into the whole issue. FOr A start I raised the issue here on site so it is public rather than covertly directly to a email address or other means. I've made the point I feel need to be made I'm awaiting someone with authority to notify me of the official response SEF, no offence to you.

One of the defining roles of the ACEs as I recall is to make the website "sticky" - i.e. to try and ecourage people to stick around here once they have signed up.

I would have thought the actions referred to above were rather wildly contractdictory to that.

"to try and ecourage people to stick around here"

Is that supposed to include criminals though? If so, then why do the staff pretend to have standards and rules?

"to try and ecourage people to stick around here"
Is that supposed to include criminals though?

Whose place is it to decide who's a criminal? A judge and jury I would have thought. And before anyone asks - people with criminal records aren't excluded from BBC sites.

says Mina *as she put Des O,Conner on shuffle*

"A judge and jury I would have thought"

No you wouldn't because that's not the way you've done things at all.

There are times and places for juries and democracy; I still don't really understand why it's assumed or seen as necessary here.



spelugx

Whatever SEF.

Indeed I agree it probably is irrelevant but having said that it was brought up and Mina beat me to precisely what I was going to say.
(mainly because the site wouldn't let me sign in yesterday.

What I was saying is that the ACEs are here to say "Welcome" and be nice people on site. It is *not* for us to decide who deserves to stay and who doesn't. Taking part in an action that results in quite a lot of people being forcible removed from the site (no matter how glorious or saintly the intentions) is about as far from ACE like behaviour as one can get.

Well said Orcus. I'd forgotten to add something about being welcoming a saying hello this ACE has definitely been saying goodbye rather than hello to a whole load of researchers by their actions.

"people being forcible removed"

They are *not* banned (unless the staff here have done something too). They can still access their accounts on the site from libraries and internet cafes (and friends' computers) just as many of them did before whenever they wanted to do something a bit more difficult, such as editing a large article.

I don't care what spin you put on it they have been forcibly removed, however temporarily and whomsoever chose to pull the plug.

What a spectacular own goal anyhow. This has caused more trouble than any dicibox users ever managed and has so deeply offended a huge proportion of your fellow researchers I doubt any of you will ever be forgiven by some.

On the contrary, I think it is an interesting example of just how morally bankrupt this site through many of its contributors is. You are just not normally so blatantly revealing of it.

One good analogy for what happened - that I haven't seen mentioned yet - would be of a person yikesing a post that broke the House Rules, and then it being hidden by a Moderator, shortly after the person posted in the thread to say (in a tactless way) why it broke the House Rules, and that they had complained about it. This would have to be done under reactive moderation, of course, so that if the post hadn't been yikesed, it wouldn't have been hidden, despite breaking the rules. Nevertheless, it's not hard to see who would be blamed for the post being hidden...

Of course, the Moderator's decision could have been wrong, in which case the constructive thing to do would be to politely contact, in privacy, a person who could reverse the decision (here, an h2g2 Editor), and not to flame the person who pressed the Complaints button, however tactless they may have been in their previous posts.

Rho

hmmm