It’s a lot different these days without these mentioned users around, but said sting operation made waves between powerful cliques so strongly the ripples can still be seen to this day..
I think that is overly melodramatic. “Powerful”? “Waves”, as opposed to ripples in a frog-pond? All this DT, rank, and merit stuff has the grandiose false importance of a schoolyard popularity contest between children.
Poor children: Anyone who has significant BTC would be unlikely to care about these cliques. Nothing against the poor,
per se—I myself am poor; I guess that
some poor people can somehow keep a proper perspective on how much supercilious forum-politicking is driven by remarkably petty levels of greed. But imagine, Eddie: Would anyone with 1000 BTC be deeply entangled in forum-DT factionalism? More importantly: In even so short a time as twenty years, will
anyone care?
As I have mentioned before, Lauda repeatedly urged me to quit the forum altogether. She regarded me as an underachiever, and she was deeply critical of me for this: “Stop wasting time.” After the time she spent striving with single-minded devotion to try to help foster a healthy community here, she herself was increasingly frustrated and pessimistic for the reasons inferred by
Agbe’s analysis. Any positive change was blocked by what she privately called “the enablers”: Not the obvious scammers and trolls—not the
unpopular people—but the game-players, the manipulative influence peddlers, their backroom politics, their public currying of favour.
Wherever she is now, I hope that she moved onto more productive endeavours. And I hope that no ill fate befell her, as seems to be implied by OP here. And I also hope that—well, let’s put it this way: I have spent the past few years being haunted by the thought that she may have done a real “Goodbye, world!” over that plagiarism thing, which I myself considered worse than that admittedly ill-advised sting operation.
I have graphically hinted at this before. I don’t think that’s likely—but I don’t think it’s terribly unlikely, either. I forgave her over that because, among many other reasons, she immediately owned up to it; and instead of lashing out at the anonymous account that
correctly accused her,
she thanked it. I hope that she forgave herself. All I know is that she was
very upset—not merely embarrassed at being caught, but sincerely angry at herself; her activity soon dropped off to its lowest-ever levels, and then she abruptly burnt her identity, cut her contacts, and disappeared. There was always a lot going on with her; it was
probably something else. Probably a coincidence.
With due apologies for being so morose, Eddie—Black Sabbath, and all. In a few days, I will return to only my normal level of pessimism.
I do dream of what could have been...
1 month Kitty admin and this place will be booming with innovation again.
Anyway, I am surprised that The Pharmacist brought up that sting operation in response to jamyr. At the time, jamyr commented on the thread where the sting operation blew up:
I have respect with Lauda and it will remain that way even if he's done something legally wrong, for me, what matters is youre doing something that is morally right.
So...
Which is exactly why no one except Quickseller and a handful of angry trolls/scammers that Lauda negged care about these accusations against Lauda. Staff doesn't care. People on DT generally don't care. That's because Lauda owned up to the screw up in judgement with the sting operation, [...]
(Corrected because
Quickseller made peace with Lauda. So now, only trolls/scammers care about it.)
You got what you wanted. Lauda is no longer a staff member. You can lock this thread now.
Wow
This will hurt the forum. Lauda was one of the most active staff members.
TMAN was together with Lauda in the same controversy. I don’t think he would mind my pointing that out, since he was always one of her strongest defenders about that (and otherwise).
Posted while I was looking for an appropriate nonexistent-kitty pic I will edit into the above [edit: together with some self-correction of sloppy statements/AI memory bitflips “foibles of human memory” in the draft I wasn’t done with]; with quoting changed to avoid top-posting:It’s a lot different these days without these mentioned users around, but said sting operation made waves between powerful cliques so strongly the ripples can still be seen to this day..
Not having several members around now is making this forum a different place altogether but after making a statement such as that you have to name names please... which operation were you referring to?
Why should he name names?
It is well-known. The matter was sufficiently well-settled that the target of the sting blanked his own post about it, to avoid being a drama-magnet.
Lauda was
fired from her forum staff position over this—a big blow to her, only two months after
she came in second in
an unofficial election for the community to suggest a new Global Moderator. She suffered years of trolling over it. Over five years later, almost two years after she disappeared, there is no need to rehash the matter. I am surprised that The Pharmacist brought it up.
Although the circumstances and particulars were very different, in the abstract, that “sting operation” reminds me of something that I once read in a political memoir. The author was offered a $5,000 bribe in a political type of context—a large sum of money, at the time; this was before
the dollar’s implosion in the late twentieth century. There was a hint that the offer was negotiable; and he had heard that others had received bribes of $50,000 to $75,000 for the same corrupt action. As he related in his memoir, he was tempted simply to see how high the person offering the bribe would go—not from any temptation to take the money, but from a desire to quantify the corruption. He thought to play along a bit, in the manner of a sting operation. Then, he realized that this could backfire very badly; so, he gave it a flat
no.
