Danny's Weblog

khmer440.com has deleted my account twice

I've often read the postings on the khmer440 website because they do have some people posting who have interesting things to say.

However, not only is the signal-to-noise ratio lower than Usenet pre-spam, but also many of the posts are extremely aggressive, such as the posts by "hanky" and others in the following thread: www.khmer440.com [http://www.khmer440.com/chat_forum/viewtopic.php?t=3951&highlight=]

When I announced my phonetic font for Khmer PKD I decided to post about it on khmer440, but the only responses were foolish: www.khmer440.com [http://www.khmer440.com/chat_forum/viewtopic.php?t=2454]

User "Doctor Seuss" apparently speaks Khmer, but he reads a word transcribed in PKD and displayed using a normal font as "jOG" and complains that it should be "jong". He clearly does not understand *anything* about phonetic alphabets. Or does he? Isn't he just picking on an error which is not in fact an error in order to be irritating?

Well, I decided there were a lot of nasty and/or stupid people on k440.

For a long time I didn't post much. But one thing was bothering me about the way my posts were displayed. khmer440 uses what appears to be stock phpbb software, although they may have hand-rolled a few things. In particular, it displays a "slogan" next to the user's name in each post which is chosen by the admin, not by the user, based on number of posts. For reasons best known to himself, the admin decided to give low posters like me the slogan "I've got nothing better to do". (Wouldn't that slogan fit *high* posters better?)

Well, this rankled with me, so I grumbled about it, and got flamed. As I read the responses (some of which I think have since been deleted), I started to wonder what exactly was going on at k440. It occurred to me that it was like "Fight Club", the movie in which callow guys inexplicably gather to beat each other to pulp. I started to make a post about this and inadvertently posted a threatening quote from one of those pugnacious pugilists on "Fight Club" without giving it an attribution.

And then it hit me: k440 is actually *run by* trolls. It is the only site like it I know where the admins actually support the trolls and delete their victims. The only trolls they do react against are those that flame k440 and their buddies.

So I logged off and went to bed ("don't feed the trolls"). The next time I tried to log in my password didn't work. It transpired my account had been disabled by the admin: no warning, no private msgs, no previous warnings, not informed by email, not a thing. When I checked the thread I had been called a troll myself – for *one post*.

Here's the thread (until they lock it or delete more msgs I suppose): www.khmer440.com [http://www.khmer440.com/chat_forum/viewtopic.php?t=3536]

When I posted *one* more msg with a new account the new account was disabled a few days later (since yesterday) and both dannyw and dannyw2 were deleted (so my posts now are shown as "guest"). Again, no warnings or notification, and this time the Admin didn't even mention it.

It's really a pity that the most active expat forum for Cambodia is run by trolls. I would start a competing bb but I'm afraid it would be attacked by the trolls who live under k440.

Debug: hittotal: 19 startban: 0 dancookie: endbandate: 2008-12-03 banned: 0 tempdate: 2008-12-03 tert: jse: jsno jsh: 19