Problem with current affairs

Well we know you are not answerable to anyone, so again, why are you here?

Nothing better to do tonight?

Sitting in the evening sun chatting with my partner and son who is heading on a trip later tonight. Having a not too shabby glass of Picpoul De Pinet as well.

What are you doing marko?

Those two threads are a blight on Boards, they are echo chambers.

A certain core group of posters will antagonise, bait and troll, posters of a differing opinion.

They then mass report the opposing posters posts in a bid to have them banned so as the echo chamber can be maintained.

Obviously, the moderators react to the reported posts and the minority view posters are disciplined.

However certain posters who have TDS have been banned and had their bans overturned .

They can literally reoffend day after day on the thread, it’s become a farce at this stage.

Posters lashing out , posting all sorts of vile personal abuse , getting banned and then returning a few weeks later, ban rescinded to repeat their behaviour.

Its one rule for one side and a different rule for everybody else.

The Trump thread is inhabited by people who have an unhealthy hatred of Trump, some post negatively about Trump on a daily basis.

This has been going on for 6 or 7 years, its not good to have such hatred in your mind.

Those who dare to challenge the hive mind will be attacked, called a Trumpite, a Klan member, stupid, lacking education, racist, fascist , a non critical thinker, etc etc

Personal insult after insult.

The moderators have a tough job to do and are understaffed but the main instigators should be thread banned and the two threads would be a lot more civil.

Its important to note that contacting, informing people and coordinating are two completely different things.

Example 1: I phoned my brother to tell him there were sausages in the butcher's again. That is an example of informing someone, communication.

Example 2: I phoned my brother to tell him there were sausages in the shop and we agreed that I would quickly run over and buy half the stock and later he would go over and buy the other half. That is coordination.

Coordination requires an agreed course of action for both parties. There has been no evidence presented of coordination, only communication.

Even if there was, does it matter? It's not against the rules as far as I know. If boards didn't want users to communicate privately it wouldn't have a PM functionality.

Did you get promoted to mod in my absence?

If Beasty asked me for a copy of all my PMs to those (two of whom I have never PM'd), I would provide them to him.

Therein lies the difference.

I have often seen a post where the poster openly states they received a PM to alert them to the thread because it would interest them or they could help answer a query.

The allegation that posters were conspiring via PM hasn't been proven. Is that because it was just a hunch? A cynical person might conclude that proof could only be provided by acknowledging that PMs are accessible.

@Boards.ie: Niamh and @Boards.ie: Odhran haven't answered here, was there a response on twitter?

Wow, just wow.

I really didn't understand the extent to which I was living inside those two poster's heads. Incredible stuff.

A tiny part of me is saying to my ego, look at that, you are really important to some people. A slightly bigger part of me is telling the tiny part to shut up, what if they found out who you really were? Would the boys in balaclavas be calling round?

I never expected to see such vitriol and obsession in response to my posting. Sure, I can be caustic, sarcastic and cutting, but to get that kind of reaction, to have other posters firing off PMs to mods about me defending their actions. Wow, just wow.

The overwhelming part of me, 99.9% of me, now just feels sorry for them. I am a nobody. I am not a TD or a politician, I am not a member of a political party, I do not work for a political party, I don't spend my day PMing others about threads (though I have maybe twice in three years PM'd somebody to look at a thread set up by someone else). I am just an ordinary member of the public, posting on an internet forum who has a hatred for Sinn Fein, borne from personal experience in the 1970s and 1980s.

But seeing these two, have they nothing better to do than obsess about other posters and how they are moderated? I mean, it is one thing to get obsessed about posting on a message board, even to have a hobby horse, but it is a whole other level to get to a level of obsession that you are mentioning another poster in every second post as Francie has done for the last two pages.

Conspiracy theories from Brucie and Dempo about cabals of other posters doing them down is just weird as well.

Thankfully my identity is unknown, if it were known I am not sure how safe I would be.

Edit: Somehow the post from Brucie where he put up his PM to Beasty which obsessed about me got cut when I quoted it.

TLDR