The closure of the three Damien Barber threads should have been discussed here, rather than diverting the discussion of the issue in the Barber threads by turning it into another self-serving Shambles campaign. It would be nice if I could be able to admit that I wasn't completely happy with the outcome of the Barber fiasco, and it would be nice to have a calm, reasonable discussion of what should be done the next time. If I had to do it over, I would have re-titled the first thread to make it seem to be less of a direct attack on an individual, and then I might have left it at that - but hindsight is 20-20, they say...

But no, discussion of things like that is not possible at Mudcat, because Shambles sees a campaign issue in every click of the "edit" button. I can't admit misjudgments, because Shambles saves my every word for future "ammunition." He doesn't really care about free expression or improving things around here - all he wants is to impose his will by bullying everyone with his smothering blanket of copy-paste babblings.

He'll go on and on for weeks about the how unfair it is that certain titles get ten spaces and others get 14 (hint: if you use a preformatted tag like "lyr req," you don't lose those 8 spaces in the title box, so your title will be longer - and there are still two spaces for the editors to play with). He paints even the most innocuous editorial action as some sort of conspiracy.

There ARE valid editorial issues that I'd like to discuss with the community in general, but any such discussion gets buried in the babblings and accusations and repetitions that Shambles dumps on us. I'd really like to answer valid questions, but Shambles has forced me into a corner where I can't answer any of them because he asks the same question in three different threads on the same day - and then raises the very same question in three more threads, three weeks later. That being the case, it's best for me to just keep my mouth shut, and just let Shambles babble on without my answering. But that means that people with reasonable questions don't get answers.

The worst is that Shambles took his campaign from the Help Forum to the general forum, and now he thinks he's entitled to hijack other threads with his campaign.

So, in his perverted campaign to promote his narrow vision of "freedom," Shambles makes all of us a bit less free.

It's too bad, isn't it?

-Joe Offer-