The Gentle Art of Making Enemies

In general, people are gloriously uncreative when it comes to provoking others.  This is more readily apparent when you factor in my last enemies, ‘organized’ flamers.  Frankly, explaining what an organized flamer is or what their site’s are about in detail would bore me to tears.  Mostly due to the fact I’ve done it one to many times.  Lets just say they are people who put up a front on the internet as a tough guy / airport lounge quality stand up comic and think they are super clever and good at getting under people’s skin.

They aren’t.

That’s because, like many trolls and dumb asses that have long flocked to the internet due to it’s amazing ability to act as a bullet shield from people finding out how pathetic they are in real life, flamers are horribly insecure and thus have to turtle into little safe harbors where they can form cliques and protect themselves from other trolls who smell blood in the water and people who know how to hit them back.  This leads to an almost hilarious tendency for them to think that they are bullet proof, their words, being hollow, are often posted condemning their latest targets on their own web sites.  I suppose their belief was that by simply saying a version of the truth that is obviously rendered from the point of view of a delusional egomaniac, that they have scored points over people they provoke.

This is also a cowardly two-fold method to keeping their sites active so they don’t get bored.  These provocations were posted after any botched ‘invasion’ of another board.  Think Pirates, only instead of sinking ships, getting treasure, and murdering the crews of enemy ships; you have about five people basically posting ‘FAGTARDS WE OWN YOU’ till they are banned from said forum.  The idea would be, annoy enough people that you flee to your own board where the then invaded forum would feel they had the upper hand and come to your board.  Then you’d swarm them, hurl insults and act like retards till they all left and if a couple stayed you’d claim you ‘stole’ members from the other board and integrate the members that stayed into your clique.  The whole point was to keep fresh blood coming to these troll forums so that they wouldn’t get bored and turn on each other.  Outside targets and occasional members from these boards coming in would keep things active.  Then the same basic insults could be used on a whole new group of people, thus keeping things ‘fresh.’

This worked for a while, believe it or not.

Until they met a few people like me.

You see, these flamer folks fell for an old trick, the bait and switch.  Being not very clever it wasn’t hard.  We had one of our members post on their forum laughing at their little internet insult titles and how pointless and boring their little fights were to the outside observer, all the while leaving casual hints as to what forum he was coming from so that they could ‘strike back’ at us.  Our goal all along.  Naturally, the flamers had felt, because their board was big (99% fake accounts and spammers, no joke – we checked) they were the ‘premiere flame forum on the Internets.’  So they ‘invaded’ our forum.  What they were basically walking into was a lose/lose situation of our own design.

Well, after a while they saw that they were dealing with people who could hit back, weren’t phased by their internet tough guy fronts, and who had managed to see through every attempt to gain the upper hand.  Oddly enough, this was the first time I met the Warden… as one of the invaders.  Small world eh?  He hated the flamers almost as much as we did.  The whole reason we provoked them was simple and based upon an almost collective pet peeve of ours, arrogance.  Arrogant people really get my panties in a twist.  Really get a bug all up in my craw.  Really piss me off.  Same with the rest of us.  The Warden was one of them, but he hated how they were cliquish, and how they stuck together and played nice-nice and all the backroom politics and two-faced cowardice they displayed.  So I had my reasons, he had his and how were we to know how that would gel later?  That and I was unemployed, bitter that my ex had left me, and looking for someone or something to take it out on.  Not to mince words this little internet crusade became something of a personal pressure valve of mine.

They plotted against us when a direct confrontation proved to be futile.  One of the plots involved getting the warden to be pals with us (something that happened anyway and not to their liking I can assure you).  Another I shot down which involved getting a member that was pretending to be nice to us (which I saw through immediately, because my assumption with regards to any of the flamers was they were not to be trusted) pretended to get ‘banned’ so that the flamers could say we ‘had to ban them because they were owning us so bad.’  It was a stupid move, devised by an even more stupid person.  Someone who had used the same trick before, many times.  You see while they were fighting an offensive war that was going nowhere I was doing my research, reading their old posts and learning their typical tactics.  I did say ‘gloriously uncreative,’ didn’t I?

My favorite plan of theirs though was the final solution they could devise.  They’d crash our forum and then offer us a forum on their site, so that they could absorb the smart and good ‘flamers’ from our site.  This stupid plan was based on three fatal assumptions that eventually bit them in the ass later on down the road.

1) That we wouldn’t go to another board being entirely aware that they need new members to keep their site active.  In a war of attrition this was especially dumb of them to think would work, since my long-term goal was to dry up the activity on their sites by freezing them in a time-consuming conflict that would give them perpetually diminishing returns.
2) That we were ‘flamers’ in the same sense that they were and were even remotely interested in their stupid internet titles or as one of their ‘regulators’ who I eventually drove batshit insane put it ‘achieving internet fame.’
3) That we could be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with.  We just wanted to watch their little corner of the internet burn. No more, no less.

Then it actually happened, our board went offline.  Now it could have been anything.  A fluke?  Flamer intervention?  Bad timing?  All three?  Probably two out of three, as tech savvy as our ‘internet terrorist’ buddies tried to puff their chests out and claim to be, they were fairly inept at hacking or even scripting.  Either way our base was gone, and thus they had ‘won.’  Or had they?  A new flame site came up shortly before the crash, and the main members of our group had accounts on my old site.  So we were able to regroup and plan our next move.

The knee-jerk reaction would be to go to the flamer’s site and attack them; however, that would be giving them exactly what they wanted, all of us to join their site and integrate.  Instead we let a few come over to harass and annoy them while we organized a takeover of that new site that popped up, a flamer ‘news’ site.  I shit you not.  The idea would be that it was the melting pot by which the site we were at war with and two others could post their versions of their pointless little squabbles and flex nuts like dipshits without having sufficient balls to do so on the site they were bitching about.

This was when our plan began to form, entirely on its own at that.  It was gloriously simple in it’s design and based upon the facts we understood about these people.

1) That they were cowards and stayed on their own boards out of fear of being singled out and mocked to the point that they’d have to flee.
2) They needed enemies coming to their boards to keep things active otherwise they started to turn on each other due to being bored and lacking a pressure valve that isn’t a regular on the board.
3) They needed some enemies to integrate to their forum and join their ‘regulators’ to keep things fresh otherwise activity dries up.
4) Without fights occurring on their boards at regular intervals the activity and interest dries up and the boards start to hemorrhage members and activity.

So our plan was simple, retardedly (I know that’s not a word fuck you)simple.  We never discussed it really, we all just sort of instinctively knew what to do.  All we would do is sit on the ‘news’ forum.  We’d slam down anyone who tried to make a move there or was a member of the site that invaded us to begin with, attack them when they left their own boards in order to keep them confined to their own sites where they would start to turn on each other, we’d single out members of their group that were easy targets (especially arrogant or mouthy people) and endlessly insult and argue with them till they either left the community entirely or turtled, and we’d keep them preoccupied talking about/arguing with us from postings on their forums to make their goading and taunts seem weak and ineffective since they were failing to get the massive influx of activity from us that they wanted to keep their dying community afloat.

All we had to do, as a matter of fact, was merely persist and refuse to join their board on any permanent basis (as that was their goal and what they wanted all along).  As long as we attacked them when they went off-site, constantly used the news forum as a soapbox to illustrate how their tactics and methods weren’t working or were horribly flawed, and kept the pressure on other sites to stay away from the conflict and not fight the big site of the three (which the other two relied on for the most part, to gain new members themselves) they could never hope to beat us or get us to leave them alone.  We also made them interested in the ‘new’ flamer ‘faction’ and moistened their collective pallets to the idea of acquiring some of us to their slowly rotting boards.

The Warden got into a ‘callout’ (a judged insult contest) with a flamer from one of the other sites while on the news forum.  A guy using a handle to disguise his identity which was the name of a retarded reporter from Miami.   The judges for this contest?  None other than people from our little gang of anti-flamers.  The reporter’s posts were awful in the extreme, to the point where one of our group actually gave him a negative score.  The Warden, needless to say, won the day.  That was when we first started working together, the reporter, as I managed to figure out, was actually the current owner/caretaker of one of the other flame sites.  A site that now is so dead that if it were a real place it’d be a fucking 10,000 year old crypt.  Either way that’s when we began to see the Warden not as another flamer retard but as an ally in our little internet war.

The Warden heavily damaged the psyche of the reporter who turned out to be a guy who called people nerds all the time even though his name stood for the fucking main villain in the old Star Wars films.  Internet Tough Guys, gotta love em.  It was, however, by my own hand that the killing blow was struck as I hunted the reporter from site to site till he cracked under the pressure and left flaming forever.  Another merciless blow for one of the only people capable of keeping his site afloat, without a leader it began to sink into a ever downward spiral of inactivity, lulz.  The funny thing about it all was that he was trying to prove that he lost the callout to a biased vote, claiming we were in cahoots with the warden and the site he came from…. the site that we were trying to bring to it’s knees!  His reporter gimmick backfired horribly because instead of dividing us and making us look like tools, it made him look like a fucking idiot and actually did get us and the Warden working together, against him.  Delicious irony.

This was also the time my site went up, the wire cutters dot com.  It existed as a free proboards forum prior but I paid for a URL to give us a permanent base of operations, fearing the inevitable activity black hole we’d crate by driving everyone away from the news forum.

The seed of destruction was already planted, when the Warden left the ‘regulators’ they tried to chase him to a goth forum, crash, and announced it in public.  The pansies called for a massive attack on the Warden and one ally.  They Announced it on the news forum saying, and I quote now “don’t let him insult our glorious sport!”  These dumb assholes thought that calling people various forms of fat, gay, and nerdy on the internet was a sport!  Their stupidity apparently knowing no bounds, they allowed themselves to be hyped up into this amazing attack to finally slay the warden (with their mean WERDZ on the internet) and break the deadly curse he laid upon the regs by, you know, trying to force them to actually flame people instead of being a little ass-kissing circle jerking clique of inept fucktards like they were.  A brave goal, but like all forums, the man who tries to take apart the ruling clique generally suffers their stupid swarm-like wrath when they finally realize that there’s a wasp in the beehive.  This actually worked in our favor because, after working with the Warden in dealing with the reporter and his little pals we decided to even the odds.

I made a handle and so did my co-admin (who I would hit with my car if I saw him crossing the street now, but that’s a tale for another time) and we proceeded to turn a 10 on 1 argument into a 3 on 1 character assassination of one particularly stupid flamer who coincidentally started the whole conflict with us when he wandered on to our original forum all those months ago.  While everyone else did damage to his paranoid fragile little psyche I struck the killing blow in that thread by merely taking an old post of his from back when he first started on the flame site listing how cliche and stupid other people’s flames were, and quoted it back at him.  Applying his old logic to his new post and showing how by his own standards he was nothing more than a boring hack who couldn’t win anything without making facts up on the spot.  It was quite satisfying to see him drop the thread like a hot potato and practically disappear for months until the embarrassing sting he suffered was long forgotten.

He later went on to produce music like Radiohead minus the talent; he also apparently looked in real life like the lead singer of said band after a bout with cancer and suffering a severe mauling by a bear.

Funny side story about the reporter guy, while it was a group effort chasing him off the news forum I proceeded to insult and harass him on every site he went to with that gimmick until he cracked like an egg and quit flaming forever ‘due to stress caused by it.’ I think the final straw was when he came to my forum and posted a giant boring post filled with animated .gifs of dicks and semen and claimed how badly he owned the warden and how pathetic he was.  Then proceeded to get a post of his deleted by one of my old admins.  He did it to test a theory, the guy had lied and made up so much BS when he was acting as the reporter gimmick that when he called us on deleting his post not only was the admin who did it able to deny it, but he also managed to convince the reporter guy that he did it himself and was trying to blame us and since his credibility was shot to hell not only did he believe us over himself…. so did everyone else.  Quite hilarious.

Unfortunately the news site went under, the reasoning was that we had done our job too well, no flamer wanted to come over there for fear of being clobbered so the site itself rotted and died.  Which, inadvertently was what I wanted to happen, but admittedly, I wanted that to be the last place to go down.  Probably an unrealistic goal.  It was okay, soon my site got dragged into it and that was our new staging ground.

By this point the damage was done, really, so we just rode the communities downward spiral like a flume ride at a water park, laughing the whole time as a community of vacuous, egocentric, boring dumb asses ate itself alive simple by having nothing to do anymore.  The regulators of the big site started forming cliques within cliques and factions within factions.  You had the red regulators, blue regulators, silver regulators, fuchsia regulators, the brotherhood of real regulators and the pink pony brigade.  It go so ridiculous we openly mocked them from my site by doing the same thing, only making it really obvious we were just fucking around and having a ton of laughs at their expense.

Now, two of the sites are gone, one closed completely and the other is so dead it may as well be.  The big site has nothing to do anymore because all their rivals are gone so all the do is sit around and try to lure the heavy hitters back like the warden with their pathetic taunts and infantile attempts at trolling.  You’d think after all this time and learning just what trolling for members would cost them they’d try something new but as I said in the beginning, we weren’t dealing with the most creative bunch of people in the world.

Like all wars in the end no one really won though, I deleted my site out of disgust after most of the members left , and while in many ways we were a catalyst for their destruction, by getting so wrapped up in such a long conflict with a group of people that could just as easily have been ignored as they pose 0 threat to anyone I had managed to inadvertently destroy my own site as well by driving off people not as interested in, nor amused by, vengeance and spite as I was.

There was another fact that led to my hate and eventually loathing of my site as well and that was the sheer ingratitude of my members, they’d constantly ask for me to provide content and things to do, then when I’d do it they’d insult it or not participate.  I’d add new features just to have my co-admins mock it openly and insult it by installing buttons and links to it on the forums obviously passive-aggressively insulting it because they wanted things their way. In the end I couldn’t please anyone so I figured, fuck it, and hit the delete button without shedding a tear.

And that’s about it.  Internet … srs bizniz, and not something I’m going to get dragged into again.

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