I was wondering if it was accidental, but then the author did reach out to a few different sources and didn't receive an answer... which could still be coincidence, but makes it seem less likely.
> dealing with this is at the bottom of our rather indefinitely long priority list. Don’t expect a swift resolution.
> We’d appreciate not being bugged about this again.
It seems they did it on purpose and they refuse to at least clarify why. My bet is that they did it for some childish reason and they don't have a courage to admit the mistake.
I hope they will now shed some light on what happened.
If they're in the middle of a Twitter dogpile, they probably wouldn't care too much about one particular guy on a blocklist if several hundred sockpuppet accounts organising on 4chan are all sending the same whining emails...
(They could have handled that email response more politely, but I can pretty easily imagine a situation where OP looks like part of the problem rather than collateral damage...)
Honestly, whether he was caught in a crossfire, intentionally banned, or even received a response meant for someone else, this is still utterly inadmissible. There is no possible situation an email of this sort is acceptable in any sort of professional context, let alone coming from a conference organizer.
Yeah you'd think that after Ondřej reached out to the organisers they'd:
a) give him the benefit of the doubt and say "Not sure what happened, sorry we've unblocked you" (most likely thing)
b) tell him whatever heinous deed he is supposed to have done
IME blocks are either accidental or for some really annoying or inappropriate behaviour. I mean it's "just" a block on twitter, but it's pretty weird for a conference to engage with the community like this.
He actually did:
> Hi Ondrej,
> dealing with this is at the bottom of our rather indefinitely long priority list. Don’t expect a swift resolution.
> We’d appreciate not being bugged about this again.
It seems they did it on purpose and they refuse to at least clarify why. My bet is that they did it for some childish reason and they don't have a courage to admit the mistake.
I hope they will now shed some light on what happened.