| > Basically. Imagine having to pay $10 to register a 4chan or reddit account and being banned for silly and ridiculous rule infractions but then being allowed back on if you registered another account("10bux"). Flip side, the paid account system means that banned trolls coming back under a different username doesn't happen nearly as often as it would on other platforms. It still does for sure, there are a couple of people who apparently have no problem throwing cash at the forums to be able to post their nonsense, but it's not really a big thing. The vast majority of users pay their 10 bucks once, maybe buy a few upgrades, and then never pay a cent more. I've been on the forums since the early 2000s and have honestly never seen frivolous bans as a thing. 6 hour probations are sometimes thrown around like candy, but they're mostly meaningless unless you do something stupid in response. In the end, the ban list is public so the system has a lot of transparency. If you know what your friend's username was you can see the exact post that earned it, as well as their history of infractions, and what mods/admins were involved. https://forums.somethingawful.com/banlist.php > I knew a guy who was huge into SA and contributed a lot of their photoshop Friday threads. One time there was a thread about a new movie, most people liked it but he simply said "I just left the theater a few hours ago, I didn't really dig it" he was immediately banned for "trolling" simply for sharing his opinion. He was the biggest SA user I knew at the time. I certainly can't say it didn't happen, there were definitely some less stable mods and of course the subject of this thread was the top admin for most of the forums' life, but my experience tells me that your friend was likely not entirely honest with you about why they got banned. |
Keep in mind I am talking about something that happened back in 2003. I long ago lost touch with this person. He was SA's biggest cheerleader and he couldn't believe I didn't have an SA forums account since I am a huge computer nerd that spent countless hours on multiple forums in those days and SA was the "place to be" back then.
He actually did show me a screenshot of the post that got him banned and I couldn't believe he got banned over that. No profanity, calling people names, nothing that got you banned from most forums. He was just calmly explaining why he thought a movie he had just seen that day wasn't very good in his opinion. He did register another account since his whole online life was based on SA at the time. By the time I thought about maybe registering an SA account it was already on the way out as being the center of internet culture.
One thing I could never figure out back in the day was SA's burning hatred of FARK.com. I used to go there just to skim the news and check out the comments. Apparently admitting liking FARK on SA was a big no no and would get you relentlessly mocked.
Again this is all ancient 15+ year old drama at this point.