But it wasn’t at first. That is the key distinction. People had an expectation of privacy.
If you think it’s ok to post the private messages that happened after 50 people joined that is different.
Even if the private messages were not posted just reading the messages is a major violation of power and trust.
It’s not pearl clutching. It’s an admin being deranged and violating the trust people had in them.
The ridiculous thing about it is the admin is acting like it’s a gotcha but if you actually read the messages it is the equivalent of Trumpers getting excited about Faucis emails.
Put another way, we didn’t have any expectation of privacy from the people we (OK, I, mostly) invited to the chat. That doesn’t at all inform the question of an administrator reading the thread and then making it public without having been invited.
But seriously, if I’m such a cunning, powerful and influential troll, you guys should let us open our subforum: I’ll build a community of civility and respect, all just to show it can be done and make my haters furious.
You can just go start your own place. It’s beyond idiocy to give more to a guy who participated in a campaign to sow discord here so that he has more of a platform to do the same.
I am neither for nor against a subforum. I’m open to the idea, pending a good proposal for what it will look like. I’m currently not willing to support some sort of ad hoc, figure-it-out-as-we-go effort.
My guess is that the probability of anyone (not a member of the PM thread) who has any knowledge of the contents of that thread to support a new subforum to be very small at the moment.
Lol, @fidgetuk, in a thread to overturn his ban for being a troll, literally creates a troll account to vote for his own fucking ban, in order to keep trolling. Then he gets his pal @Jalfrezi to try to make hay of it, also to continue the troll (I’m sure there’s another fun pm thread involving the two of them in the new forum where they lol at all of you for it). If you guys fucking overturn this ban this forum is done. This is ludicrous. He is literally trolling on top of trolling on top of trolling.
I have changed my mind about not voting on this one.
After this latest troll attempt, I am now in the “keep him banned” camp. Nothing personal, but since mods should have the best interests of the forum at heart, I can’t condone allowing him back to do the same things over and over.
As a side note: anyone can believe what they want about me, but I honestly do not hate anyone on this forum. I am not a grudge-holder. Sure, some people get on my nerves sometimes, but life is too short for holding on to shit like that.
Do some of you do things that really grinds my gears? Yes. Do I think some of the antics that go on are childish and should be moderated? Yes. But I don’t hate you. I just want you to be better.
“what a crock of shit it is to satisfy every tom dick and harry stranger in the world. No wonder Hemingway went to Cuba and Joyce to France. I was in love with the world thru blue purple curtains when I knew you and now I have to look at it thru hard iron eyes”
― Jack Kerouac, Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters, 1957-1969