| Space Goat |
06-16-2004 11:36 AM |
This is what I posted in the staff forum about the Tony thread...
It's a long story. Right when the thread started, before it was popular and only had about 10 replies, Tony PM'd me pleading I delete it. I told him that I couldn't do that (like I always tell him when he asks me to do this), but because he had recently lent me some webspace on his server (even though I never used it), I didn't think it was right that I just ignore him after he had just recently helped me. So, I promised him I'd never archive it and that it would eventually be pruned with other old threads in time. When I told him this though, I had no idea how monumental it would eventually become. I didn't consider this as a hard promise to keep since the last archived thread was almost a year old, so it seemed like an easy way for me to get him off my back.
He seemed really concerned about his real name being used in all this character assination, and wanted to protect his career and real life identity. In addition to this, he expressed a sincere desire to leave the community for good. He was (and still is) asking me to delete all records of his name on the forums, but because I didn't want to do that, and because I didn't want to fight him over it, I tried to play both sides of this entire ordeal and I agreed to help him.
Anyway, the thread got more and more popular, and eventually Lmac moved it to the archived threads. Tony was upset of course, and told me to get rid of it. I had already promised to never archive it, so it was hard to come up with something to say that would get him to leave me alone while at the same time keeping the thread in the archived forum where I knew it belonged. Simply put, there was too much attention on the issue and I didn't want to get involved, so I made yet another promise to him. I told him that I would delete it in a few months once people sort of forgot about it.
Truth of the matter is though, I wasn't willing to risk deleting it and not being able to bring it back if people noticed it was gone. So once he started bugging me about it again (this was just a few days ago) I just moved it to an unviewable forum that I created specifically for it.
But Tony totally ruined it for himself. Not hours after he thought I had deleted it, he goes and starts acting like a lunatic again in a private conversation with Sammy, a convo TONY started. Sammy posted it, and all it amounted to was a reminder for people to go take a fresh look at the old Tony thread in the archived forum. As you can imagine, they noticed the thread was gone in less than a day after I had moved it.
So, frustrated with Tony's wreckless behavior, I told him I wasn't going to help him anymore. The chance to remove this thread silently had gone out the window, and there is nothing left I can do for him. The only thing he can hope for is the new forum to some day be done. It is using a new database, and none of the old threads will be carried over; archived classics or not. He is, however still bugging me about removing his account, or changing the name to something else, but I really don't agree with that and find his distress on this entire identity matter overplayed and unworthy of his or my concern.
So that's it really. The thread is going to stay in the archived forum until the new board comes out. If you want to save it, or anything else for that matter, I suggest you do a File->Save As...
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