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The Secret Codex of the Spoiler Boards by griftd ©
Part III

In the early days of March, EZ had settled into a routine. The wild saloon that had been filled with boozing and brawling had become almost staid. Vanillaslave controlled the Spoilers forum by harassing her Amish, the Sucks people happily played their vile games on Burn Baby Burn and I, now hopelessly wrapped up in board culture, had found some greener pastures to explore. It was definitely the quiet before the storm.

I no longer squashed the Amish or blessed people’s hearts. I still lurked and even occasionally posted but like other posters before me, with the collapse of the original Spoilers board, new places had been born and I found myself drifting away from EZ.

One thing that remained unchanged was the nightly attack of the trolls. You could almost set your watch to the time when out of no where, posters never seen before would blast onto the board spewing a non-stop stream of off topic threads. It was a late night ritual. Every morning, the regular posters would wake to find locked threads containing every kind of nonsense imaginable. Usually, they also contained Vanillaslave’s “bless your heart” final blow.

In mid March, a poster named Nailbone asked the simple question, what are the rules of this board? It was a damned good question since unlike the old boards, rules had never been published. Since the Forces of Darkness had never said a word about rules, Vanillaslave took it on herself to answer all questions based on what she knew from the old board and the precedents she had established in her Amish hunts. The first EZ FAQ was born. It was both highly entertaining and informative. An example:



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Q. oh man like where did my post go, dude I think Mark Burnett’s here, dude and my post just like got crushed.

A. Your thread sucked. If it sucked in a funny way I might have shipped it to the Sucks folder. If it sucked in the “omg Rodger fell off a horse while playing blind Marco Polo” I may have just deleted the crap. If it sucked but I think people might learn something from it sticking around a few days (like who the amish posters are)….then I locked it.

Bless your heart, nilla
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She had a certain flair.

Things continued to cruise along but the troll attacks continued to worsen. Finally, one night, even the dread Vanillaslave was overwhelmed. She was locking posts as fast as she could and even she couldn’t keep up. Bradly450 and his cohorts were staging a massive frontal assault on the Spoilers forum. Vanillaslave begged the Forces of Darkness for Administrator power. As a lowly Moderator, she could lock and delete threads but only an Administrator had the power to ban posters. She thought that if she could just ban a few of the spammers, she could catch her breath. On March 17, Vanillaslave was promoted from Moderator to Administrator.

Now armed with the ability to ban as well as delete and lock, Vanillaslave once again had the spoiler boards under control. She also had some help. Another administrator, redandblack, briefly made a public appearance and was promptly scorched. He quickly retreated back into the shadows. A new kid showed up as well. He had been a fairly regular poster and like Vanillaslave, as if by magic, one day the word Moderator appeared below BeefJerky’s name.

Beefjerky was not nearly as abrasive as Vanillaslave but he was not completely hidden in the shadows like the other moderators. It was apparent from the beginning that he was a bit of a smart ass but was serious about trying to keep the Spoiler board clean. He stumbled around like a newborn puppy for several days. He even publicly called Vanillaslave to the carpet for her antics. Of course that was a bit over the line since it wouldn’t be wise for mods and admins to fight in public. He was making mistakes, but he was learning.

With all these new powers and now with her own Moderator to slough work on, Vanillaslave starting seeking new fun. She began visiting the Sucks forum. Here, she learned the marvels of Burn Baby Burn, she flirted outrageously with GBIAD and, just as in the Spoilers forum, she pissed off plenty of people.

Sucks was absolutely crazy in those days. Almost anything went. The trash that was posted was vile and tasteless beyond belief. There were some nuggets here and there, but there were a lot of wild ramblings too. There was also a healthy case of derision for people in the Spoilers folder. Sucks felt like the black sheep to the older perfect child, Spoiler. Everyone certainly did not welcome Vanillaslave and when she proceeded to lock threads in the mostly unmoderated Sucks forum, all hell threatened to break loose. Of course, the thread she locked was one that had pictures of Tina’s teenage daughter and it was probably prudent to lock it, but to the Sucks degenerates nothing short of an actual snuff film should have been locked.

Tina’s daughter should have been seen as a shot across the bow but everyone was partying too hard to notice. On March 19, Burn Baby Burn was locked.

Burn Baby Burn had become a monster thread. It was well beyond its original intent now and was rapidly becoming both vile and legendary. A vile legend. It was literally littered with porn and other assorted green apples. Some moderators began working on Burn Baby Burn with a scalpel, carefully excising the porn while keeping the body intact. On March 19, for reasons that are still unclear, someone locked Baby down. The screams of frustration from the citizens of Suck could be heard clear in the I Heart Survivor forum. Vanillaslave took it upon herself to unlock Burn Baby Burn and the porn kings and queens returned to their baby. Little did they know that the war had only just started.

What is it about March? It’s a weird month filled with strange occurrences. Once again, the fate of the Sucks and Spoilers was inexorably tangled. Deep in the night, after Burn Baby Burn had been locked, something truly dreadful happened in the Spoilers forum.

When the Spoilers posters wiped the crust from their eyes on the morning of March 20, they were stunned into silence by a change in the landscape. Pages, not threads but literally pages of threads had been deleted from the Spoilers forum. The facts of this episode remain murky to this day. Two facts are known. Approximately ten full pages of posts were deleted and it had to have been done by an administrator / moderator. Other than that, the mass deletion episode on the Spoiler board remains one of EZ’s great unsolved mysteries.

Many immediately blamed Vanillaslave. She certainly had made many enemies during the previous weeks and the hounds smelled an opportunity. They tasted blood from a wounded prey. I will relate to you what Vanillaslave told me occurred that night. She left the Spoilers forum for a few hours. When she returned, she discovered that the nightly troll attack had occurred but this time it was different. This time the trolls were many and they seemed intent on destroying the board. There were obviously moderators working in the forum because there were no less than five pages filled with nothing but locked threads. Five pages. Nothing but locked threads. EZ had seen pages filled with locked threads but nothing like this. Vanillaslave admits to deleting those locked threads but she does not admit to deleting the rest. She blames another faceless administrator.

The residents of the Spoilers forum knew better. It was immediately obvious that more than just troll threads were gone. Many posters began asking what had happened to their previous posts. Spoiling stopped in its tracks as the entire forum staggered in the feeling of tragedy. Sadness soon turned to anger. The pleas were loud and for the most part, reasonable. All they wanted to know was why. They were met with silence.

No one was responding. The Spoilers forum was like a great wounded animal begging for mercy and receiving none. Even Vanillaslave was strangely quiet.

I am not sure what was happening in the Sucks forum during this time because I was in the Spoilers forum with the other vocal critics demanding answers. From what I have heard, still smarting from the lock of Burn Baby Burn, the Sucks posters made good of the opportunity of the chaos happening in Spoilers. They began rioting. I wasn’t there so I don’t have a good description but I was told the vile ichor that began pouring into Sucks was truly a horrible, horrible thing.

Back in the Spoilers folder, the screaming for answers became more and more heated. Even genteel, reasonable posters like Erstwhile joined in the chorus demanding an explanation. Eventually, a few administrators, including ones that had never been seen before like TheTree, showed up and basically said that everyone should just be quiet and move on. It would have been better to just douse the board in gasoline and light a match. Both erstwhile and I wrote long and, though certainly brutal, polite posts demanding an answer from the unseen Forces of Darkness.

Then the bannings started.

At 3:42pm on March 20, Rodgerfan became the first to fall.

If you haven’t met Rodgerfan, then you have missed something. He is one of the nicest posters you will ever meet in the board world. He is no milk and cookies guy and he can get as rough and tumble as needed but the one word that always comes to mind in describing his personality is decent. It is unknown to this day why he was banned. He simply vanished. He was not the last.

The Forces of Darkness began to lay waste to the rebellion in both the Sucks forum and the Spoilers forum. For the next two days, anyone who questioned what was happening, what had happened or any actions of the administration were summarily executed. EZ was under martial law.

Soon, rumors began to reach EZ of a place of rebellion. An almost mythical place where posters were allowed to run free without fear of banning or deletion. The place was called Hobietopia. The banned posters from the Sucks forum gathered in this new place and rebuilt their society. Still, there were stragglers that had been left behind at EZ. The newly minted residents of Hobietopia set out on missions of resistance behind the iron curtain of EZ to post the link to their new land. Most were caught and banned again. A few got through and were able to notify their friends. New people joined the resistance movement and began posting the link to this land of freedom. The Forces of Darkness moved in quickly and began banning anyone that posted a link to another board. As the iron fist of tyranny closed tighter, more posters slipped between the fingers.

At spoilers, there was no hobietopia, but there were other boards. Some posters made loud angry exits. Others slipped quietly away in the night. The ones that remained attempted to keep the spoiling moving forward but the heart had been removed from the body. The place they had come to love had been ripped apart, hacked into pieces and now was being cast aside and they didn’t even know why.

Still, they refused to move on. They continued to post. They continued to ask why. The bannings continued. Then, in the early morning hours of March 22, it all stopped.

EZ was locked down.

In Memoriam of Those That Were Banned

rodgerfan
eldiablo
colbsterbrandocheese
griftd
bangabong
mindgameii
justdesserts
erstwhile
snowfrigginwhite
darkgwalchmei
chicagosurvivor
canuck80
mannerman
alkabong
leoninarut
slugberta
boingabong
jerrismother
wolfangel
nnd663
loveisariot
madwoman
rabbitofcaerbannog
scarrysherry
devesta
gumby
nickchicky
nodopehere
nickchick
fuzzybutterpants
fluffybubblebutt
jorel5
crazyladyrisesagain
crazyladystrikesback
thisjustin
sheilasgonetroppa
areyouserious
tadpolelives
stacefrog
mountaingirl
beagee
gums2
mrpurtyone
crayzhorse
krazyhorse
pleasepassthepork
mynameisjonas
jeffanalprobst
dcass4128
scubagal
bilbecat
kilbylover
survivethis


To Be Cont……..next: A New Sheriff In Town


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The Secret Codex of the Spoiler Boards by griftd ©
Part IV

One must feel the taste of the lash before one can understand the power of the whip. So now I was banned. I probably shouldn’t have cared. I had been accepted onto the Ellipsiiis board and now had a quiet, peaceful home where I could spoil to my hearts delight. It didn’t matter. I was angry and I was frustrated. I don’t like being denied. There were questions that were still unanswered and I do not like unfinished business. I continued to hang around EZ. I could read the threads but I couldn’t post. The ominous message “You Have Been Banned from this EZ board” appeared under every single post. Actually, no one could post for nearly two days. EZ was completely locked down. More questions in the darkness. What I did not know was that soon I would start to find the answers to this question, as I would be given the janitor’s keys to the sewers of EZ.

One thing that did become clear immediately was that there was an early victim of the Great Bannings. Few noticed at the time. If they did, they were truly shocked and maybe they saw the handwriting on the walls. Just prior to the great uprisings of March 20, AtlantaFatMike was banned. AFM wasn’t around much any more; he had gone on to greener pastures. The reasons for his banning were unclear although it is assumed that he pissed off an administrator and that person brought the hammer down. He came back as El Diablo, joined the rebellion and was promptly banned again.

It was generally assumed that Vanillaslave was responsible for the Great Bannings. In the seething, boiling land of Hobietopia, she was burned in effigy and flamed without mercy. It would get worse.

During the days of great tribulation, I was in contact with Vanillaslave almost daily. She was angry, hurt and frustrated. She claimed that she was not responsible for any of this mess and the person who was would not say anything. A Faceless and Nameless force walked the now quiet corridors of EZ.

It was during these conversations that I started to learn the secrets of the early days. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear anything about it. I had my own ball of anger buried in my stomach and I didn’t really care what was going on behind the scenes. Of course, curiosity will overpower anger any day of the week.

The most shocking revelation was how little direction the Administrators and Moderators had received. No one had ever told them how to do their job. They were given no guidelines. They didn’t even know each other. Vanillaslave knew redandblack and Beefjerky and that was it. She knew there were others but she had no idea who they were. All moderators had been created just like her. One day the title just appeared. They were given the keys to the kingdom but no roadmap.

For three solid days during the time of tribulation, EZ rocked and rolled. During all the madness, deleting and banning, a new forum appeared. The Rathaus. Rathaus is German and roughly translates to “city hall”. The connotations of Rat House were pretty obvious. No one knew what it was but they knew that when you clicked on it everything was written in German and it was password protected.

Vanillaslave explained to me that the Rathaus was going to be the place where Admins and Mods communicated with each other. It was created by the Faceless One. She was the first to post in it and asked why so many people were being banned. She also asked that I be made a Moderator.

I was a little stunned by this last piece of information. Here I was banned and now she wanted me to help her run the joint. Could it get any loonier?

Vanillaslave was convinced I would be made a moderator soon, so without asking anyone she gave me the password to the Rathaus. One of the first things I discovered was that she was telling the truth about the bannings. She was not responsible. The Faceless One had done all the bannings. Every single person I have listed was banned by him and not Vanillaslave. I later confirmed this once I figured out how to read the logs.

This pissed me off. As if I wasn’t already angry enough. Vanillaslave was the most obnoxious, rancorous person on EZ. She wielded her power like a chainsaw, arbitrarily cutting away posts and posters with glee. She was not liked and much of that animus was deserved. But here was proof that she was not responsible for the greatest atrocity yet seen and still the Forces of Darkness said nothing, allowing her to twist in the wind. As the only Administrator that was well known, she received all of the blame as well as the lion share of the emails. Aja was also being flooded with emails.

Aja had long ago given out her email address, in case anyone wanted to request a specific vidcap. I had even used it a few times. Now, every poster in the world that was staggering around looking for answers was emailing either Vanillaslave or Aja.

On 3-23, the board was finally turned back on. Posters wandered through the smoking ruins. Many wondered what had truly happened. Many wondered where had all the posters gone. Many questions still needed to be answered.

I wandered the landscape too but at least now I was starting to discover some answers. I also discovered that now when I signed on, there were check boxes next to all the threads. There was also a drop down menu at the bottom of the screen, which had options like move, close and re-open. There was also the same glaring message below each post that I was still banned. I had been made a Moderator but I will still banned. The Banned Moderator.

I guess it would be appropriate to use LOL here because when I realized that I had been promoted yet still banned, I literally fell out of my chair I was laughing so hard. The sheer irony of the situation was absolutely delicious. It was the best example of how completely and utterly disorganized the admins were in the early days of the Rathaus. I could move, close and even delete threads but I couldn’t post. Fortunately, I also could still get in the Rathaus where the rats continued to run blindly into walls.

Most of those banned gave up caring about the events on EZ. They were content to move on to other worlds and forget the nastiness that had occurred. The citizens of Hobietopia still railed against the tyranny, but having found a new playground, they soon became distracted by their old nasty habits. One that did care and was making it known was AtlantaFatMike. He had never received an explanation for his banning and like me; he is not a person that tolerates unfinished business. The moderators and admins made the whole situation even more comical by posting in public that AFM was not banned. Down in the sewers, they desperately tried to find out why AFM was saying this when they knew it could not be true. Meanwhile, AFM continued to come back under various pseudonyms and harass the holy living hell out of any admin who dared to show their face.

Finally, an admin found that during the Great Bannings, someone had banned several people by email address as well screen name. AtlantaFatMike was one of these. So was I.

On March 25, I was unbanned. I had the powers of a moderator and now I had my voice again. My first action was to quickly get into a fight with Beefjerky.

Beefy welcomed me with open arms and pointed out the freshly minted guidelines produced by the Forces of Darkness. I promptly threw it back in his face. I was still angry. Still upset about the way things had been handled. After sitting for two days watching the people in charge run all over themselves, in my own hubris, I decided that they simply did not have a fucking clue.

The main bone of contention that I had with the new guidelines was they instructed admins and mods to be neither seen nor heard. Most of this was the result of Vanillaslave becoming a lightning rod during the recent troubles. Of course, it didn’t take into account the fact that she became a lightning rod because she was the only one that was trying to answer anyone’s questions. The Forces of Darkness wanted her to give up the name Vanillaslave since it was now so infamous. She could come back under another name and silently admin the board from the dark shadows. Stubborn and ornery to the end, she refused and told the Faceless One that if she could not do it her way, she should be stripped of her powers and would go back to being a regular user. Her wish was granted and the reign of Vanillaslave the Adminstrator was over.

There were others that were refusing to be silent. Stealing back under the cover of pseudonyms, Rodgerfan and Madwoman both began asking why they were banned. Both had been stunned by the apparent capriciousness of the actions of the Forces of Darkness. Rodgerfan stated his case rather succinctly and then moved on to other places. Madwoman would not be denied. In her usual loquacious manner and with a venomous pen, she railed against the system. She would not be satisfied until she was reinstated. She posted again and again with alarming speed and frequency. Patience was not her strong suit. Eventually her voice was heard and Madwoman was the first regular user to be reinstated. (Author’s Note: You can still find many of these posts under the nic Iamstillwaiting in the FAQ forum.)

I refused to play by their rules. I felt that the greatest mistake made by the Forces of Darkness during the great tribulation was not coming clean on what happened. I agonized for a while over whether to use these new powers or simply walk away. It’s not an easy thing to be an outcast and then be asked to starting using that same power that was used against you. I was finally convinced when the Faceless One explained that the purpose of moderation was to keep the boards free for the vast herd of silent lurkers who only wanted to read spoilers and had no interest in the other issues swirling through the system. I had once been one of those lowly lurkers and this hit close to my heart.

Still, I set out to do it my way. I would not be silent. I would not be unknown. I would not lock threads without explanation. I certainly would not ban anyone. I was convinced there was a better way.

My first public post following my banning was to let the Spoiler forum know there was new sheriff in town and that things would be different. Some were glad to see a familiar face. Some were horrified that one of the members of the rebellion had succumbed to the dark side. I didn’t care what they thought, I started going about my business. I began locking and moving threads; always careful to remain within the standards I had publicly stated. Those standards weren’t much different from the ones Vanillaslave had established long ago.

It wasn’t long before I ran into @#%$. @#%$ and his partner Mel had hit the board when it was turned back on. He was the webmaster of another Survivor site and he claimed to have a list of bootees that was correct through the first eight episodes. He began repeatedly posting this fact along with the link to his board in the Spoilers forum. He was trying to attract spoiler posters to his board and this list was the bait. It was a good ploy since the board was still reeling and many posters were jaded. They were ripe for the plucking.

The precedent of posting no links had been firmly established during the great tribulation. @#%$’ posts were quickly either deleted or locked. Soon, Mel showed up with the same tactic and the same result. Neither would give up. Despite being repeatedly banned by the Forces of Darkness, @#%$ kept coming back under different ghost nics and posting his link.

I ran into him during my first full day of moderation. I didn’t have the power to ban him and I had seen how fruitless it was to simply lock his threads. So I took a different tact. I just deleted them. Over and over again. As soon as I had one deleted another would appear. @#%$ noticed what was happening and began addressing me personally. He claimed to have several computers at his disposal and threatened to overrun the board with spam. I kept deleting. After about twenty minutes of this stalemate, he finally tired of the game and left. He would be back.

I was definitely reaching a peak after crawling from the lowest point. I had moderated Spoilers for nearly two days and my method was working. People still screamed bloody murder when their threads were locked. I even started receiving hate mail. I was having a blast. The spoilers forum was coming around and starting to recover from the recent events. It was staying clean and people were posting spoilers again.

On March 26 at about 4:00pm, I walked away from my computer for about ten minutes. Spoilers was quiet. Not much going on so I decided to go grab some fresh air. When I returned, hell had erupted once again. I didn’t realize what had happened at first. I stared at the screen and tried to understand why every thread appeared to have been born early that morning. I had been on the board all day and people had been posting in the afternoon. Then it hit me. Someone had wiped out an entire page of threads. An entire day was gone. It was like when you are sleeping and you think you have awakened only to realize that you are still in the same nightmare.

I started screaming to anyone who would listen. I needed to know what was going on. I had been working hard and felt I had made some headway. Now it was all gone. All ruined in a ten minute period. The spoilers were on the brink of bloody rebellion once again. Once again, no answers were forthcoming.

I was jaded. I had been through this before and didn’t have the energy to do it again. I had been a moderator for two days and I was already burnt out.

To Be Cont……..Next: We Are Switzerland


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The Secret Codex of the Spoiler Boards by griftd ©

Part VII

Uncle Camerman Spolier. Yes, I spelled it correctly. That’s exactly how kingmarkburnett posted it in his original posts and much to his chagrin, the admins and mods insisted on changing it back every time he corrected the spelling. An innocent request for a long lost boot list slowly turned into the first Spoiler forum legendary thread.

I thought Uncle was rather amusing. I remembered RyanBBBs spoiler. It was one of many boot lists that came out in the early days. I think if we had saved them all we would have seen that every conceivable combination of bootees was covered. The debate on the Uncle thread swirled even though Ryan had admitted it was a hoax. It was becoming a large thread but I didn’t see any reason to be alarmed. After all, I had bigger fish to fry.

We knew there was a board war raging nearby but for the most part EZ was staying out of it. We got occasional insurgencies from Board War guerillas. We did everything we could to keep them at bay. We were a little like Laos sitting right next to Vietnam. Never really involved but occasionally the site of some vicious skirmishes and some illegal bombing.

A brief firefight erupted in early April when an unknown poster named Survivorantactica posted what he claimed was the EBT’s predictions. He also claimed that EBT was not making these predictions based on deduction and logic but by relying solely on a secret source. This was a pretty large bomb since the EBT was getting some serious press as a result of their uncanny accuracy.

The game was afoot again. Any time one of these posts appeared there was a tectonic shift in the spoiler forum as the focus moved from spoiling Survivor to spoiling Ellipsiiis.

I knew who SurvivorAntarctica was and I even posted an obscure reference nailing his identity on the thread. A few days later, he would reveal himself. On 4-10, Gatormeatisyummy announced that the Board Wars were over and neither he nor his “friend” SurvivorAntarctica would leak any more information.

Like a bad head cold, the Ellipsiiis “source” rumor spread across the board. Soon, the “source” discussion and talk of Ellipsiiis even infected Uncle Camerman. Everyone’s favorite Uncle was developing quite a following and its size was becoming impressive. In just two days it had grown to over 200 posts. It was now easily the largest thread in the spoilers forum, surpassing even Toddnick’s vote thread.

Uncle was a ravenous beast and consumed anything that came his way.

Just after SurvivorAntarctica lobbed his bomb onto the board another new face, SurvivorLover made a splash. This person had a strong desire to make everyone play nice and share each other’s toys. His History of the Board Wars was a classic. In fact it could easily be seen as the prequel to this very tale.

It told a tale of times when all the spoilers lived under one roof and were a large extended, eat together at the dinner table family. It was a lovely tale and it placed most of the blame for the current mess on Fantasy Outback.Can’t say I disagree with that assessment but there was a lot more going. Survivorlover called for people to post and cleanse the air. Many did, unfortunately many of the generals involved in the war did not.

I don’t know if SurvivorLover’s History was responsible, but the incursions became less frequent. Gator did “come clean” about posting leaks and promised to not do it anymore. Coincidence? Who really knows.

Meanwhile, Uncle was becoming one big bastard. I finally decided to join in the fun around page 20. That’s right, page 20. Uncle had now grown to over 400 posts with no end in sight. One thing I learned early on is that once a thread gets to a certain proportion it develops an inertia that you simply cannot stop. If you do, you will get the EZ board proof of Newton’s Laws. Kill a thread that is popular and you will watch as 30 more threads pop up asking you why you did it. It’s much easier to just allow the one large thread to grow. At least, you know where everyone is. It’s one of the reasons we try to kill off topic threads quickly, lest they grow to unmanageable sizes.

Uncle had it all. Conspiracy talk. Spoiler talk. Trash talk. It had become the Spoiler forum version of BurnBabyBurn. It was so much fun that soon even the admins got into the act. Well, at least BeefJerky and I did. I think we probably needed an outlet to vent some steam just like everyone else.

Beefjerky’s fun was briefly interrupted by yet another intrusion from @#%$. This time @#%$ proposed a deal and BeefJerky took him up on it. If Beefy would delete all @#%$ threads in the spoiler forum including those that contained relevant spoiler information, @#%$ was stop spamming the board. BeefJerky complied with his end of the bargain. Two days later, @#%$ broke his end and started spamming again. Like clockwork, he was banned again. Well, at least this incarnation was banned again. It was impossible to ban all of his ghostnics, but he made for good practice.

Actually, @#%$ was not our biggest worry. He was a pain in the ass but he was pretty easy to spot. Hoaxes were not as easy to spot. We already had one about Edina Lester, an alledged Australian source, and one about some damned river challenge. My philosophy was that I would leave a spoiler post alone if it had any air of truth and sanity. It wasn’t my responsibility to debunk red herrings. That was the job of the spoilers. Once something was proved a hoax however, we moved quickly and got rid of it. We had certainly seen how a spoiler debate can quickly turn into an endless debate about hoaxes, ethics, Uncles and god knows what else.

Then came Kronoshedron. Then came Seraphaem. Of course, now that we had a resident angel and a resident devil, not far behind was…Jesus. Weirdness was seeping out of the walls. It was like Dante Alighieri had eaten an entire blotter and was now in firm control of EZ.

We needed help. We had fairly good control of the situation but there were still gaps in our defenses. Late at night, the trolls, fakers, demons and angels still ruled. I couldn’t stay up until three in the morning every night putting out all the flashfires. What we needed was a west coaster.

There was one person in boardland that I trusted with the job. He also lived far out west, tended to stay up well past the witching hour and was just crazy enough to take the job. After a brief discussion with the other admins, I promoted Owen93 to moderator.

I will be honest, my recollection of the entire angels and devils period is a little murky. Unfortunately, many of the written records have been lost forever. I tried to keep my nose out of those threads because they tended to steer in the direction of EBT and I wanted no part of it. Beefjerky, however, could smell a hoax like a foxhound and he watched these newcomers like a hawk.

Kronoshedron appeared in early April and although he kept just enough spoiler material in his threads to keep them open, his main focus was Ellipsiiis. He clamed to be a former member who still had inside information. Like a tick on a hound dog, he jumped on the whole source rumor. He threw out just enough tidbits about the alledeged inner workings of EBT to make himself credible. Now, I have been called a pawn, I have been called a nazi, I have been called a “core member”, whatever the hell that means, I have even been called Chris Ender, head of CBS publicity, but I have never been called a “team leader”, I have never heard of a top fifty and I damned sure have never heard anyone referred to as “peter pan”. What I did know was that I had been member of the EBT since it was first formed and I knew one other thing. Kronoshedron was full of shit.

If he was a member of the EBT then surely possums would soon dance at the prom. The fact the he seemed obsessed with his cap lock button should have tipped people off.

Serapheam, however, was a bit more clever. Of course his posts were also about EBT. They were just delivered like a knuckleball. Serapheam always came forward with these long rambling posts full of biblical quotes, full of stories about deceit, angels, demons and a bunch of other nonsense. There was just enough of a storyline to make it seem plausible. A single post from Seraphaem would tell you who was going to be booted this week, the identity of the Faceless One and also explain the entire Board War in a homily. It was like watching a fire and brimstone preacher early on Sunday morning after seeing him dose at last night’s local rave.

Jesus literally came as a voice from the ether. When you have a board with over six thousand users, you attract all kinds of weirdoes. It was only a matter of time before we attracted internet deejays.

Dan and Scott ran the most profane potty mouthed internet radio show on the web. In an example of exquisite irony, they hooked up with an alleged insider who went by the handle of Jesus. Apparently, Jesus had a track record for predictions that rivaled the EBT. It seemed only appropriate since he was the all seeing and all knowing.

It presented quite a puzzle when the deejays appeared on the board. On the one hand, here was a legitimate spoiler. After all, Jesus had a string of successes and he claimed to have an inside source. If you ignore the blasphemous nature of his name, his credentials as spoiler material were impeccable. On the other hand, you had a couple of yahoo internet deejays that were looking to boost their “ratings”. Should we allow them to link their show?

In the end we decided that they could post but we were going to delete any link. We had taken a hard line with @#%$ and we couldn’t back off now. The one thing that Dan and Scott learned very quickly that @#%$ never realized is once you are known, people will find you. The nasty boys didn’t make too much noise about having their link deleted. They were getting attention and when you are starving in the desert, or an internet deejay, even a soda cracker seems like filet mignon.

On the Uncle Camerman thread everyone was partying and ignoring the chaos encircling the board. A long time after it was over, I pinpointed the exact moment that the Uncle moved from simple conspiracy to legend.

On page 13, Count Asterisk posted….



Quote:
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Like any great religious leader, Uncle Cameraman has his true believers and his detractors. The true believers accept his word as Gospel and as the legend grows, more and more miracles are attributed to him. His detractors however use any flaw in his prediction to reject his entire doctrine.
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It had moved from monster thread to quasi-religion. Hell. It was a cult.

People began to pay homage to the Uncle. They shouted to the rafters that they BELIEVED in the Uncle. I couldn’t resist. Neither could Beefjerky.

Beefy had the whole apostle thing down pat. He was the John the Baptist of Uncle Camerman. I think maybe the whole Seraphaem thing started to infect his brain. It was his thing though and he did it with flair. He began to twist the Uncle Camerman tale around the New Testament story in a way that would have made a side show contortionist proud. I, on the other hand, decided to live out my long time fantasy of being the screenwriter for a monster movie.

I started making posts describing the cataclysmic battles between Uncle and Ellipsiiis. Of course it was set in Tokyo.Of course they weren’t messageboard threads but monsters well over one hundred feet tall. And of course, Beefjerky and I weren’t message board administrators. We were the two scientests in white lab coats whose dialogue was always out of sync.

On April 12, Uncle was peaking to a frenzy. It was a show day and the chips were down. Uncle had picked Colby to go that night. The EBT and others had picked Amber. When Colby won immunity that night, the thread that ate the Spoilers forum had reached one thousand posts. One thousand posts in less than six days. Over one hundred fifty posts a day. Over three hundred in the last day alone. Now, it was over. Amber was booted and Uncle Camerman was done.

Two days later, I sat and stared at Uncle Camerman. He was locked. Impotent. Never before and never again would anyone see a posting feeding frenzy with the power of the Spolier. Yet, there he was. Harmlessly floating down the spoiler forum; ignored as new posts and new theories were being flailed and flogged.

I moved my dear Uncle to Off Topic. I reopened him. I simply couldn’t let him fade away. Soon, the believers returned. They wailed their lamentations. They donned sackcloth, thrashed their arms and gnashed their teeth. In the end, the Uncle had failed, but they would not fail him. Oh yes, the Uncle lived. The Uncle would always live.


To Be Con’t…….Next: What is this MESS? And what the hell is a CBT?
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The Secret Codex of the Spoiler Boards by griftd ©

Part VIII


It was the time of Angels, devils and conspiracies. As we approached the penultimate S2 episode, the spoilers forum had become the home of the prediction minded, the theologically minded and the simple minded. Survivor Sucks had made its reputation during S1 with an uncanny string of accurate predictions. At the beginning of S2, no one was predicting the order of bootees. Some blamed a lack of spoilers. Some blamed the death of the original spoiler boards. Some even blamed Survivor Sucks.

Now, with the conclusion rapidly approaching, we had predictions from Jesus, Ellipsiiis, and the Boston Herald. We also had the rambling posts of Seraphaem and his minions. Everyone wanted a piece of the act.

No matter how stringently we moderated the spoilers forum, it was obvious that it would never return to the glory days of making accurate predictions. The new champion in that arena was Ellipsiiis. The mysterious cabal had correctly predicted every bootee since the merge. Six in a row. There were rumors swirling about a secret source, purloined episode summaries and even a satellite feed in Nova Scotia.

Nothing could stir up EZ like discussions about Ellipsiiis. Of course it didn’t help that they played Fantasy Outback and, with the exception of two teams, were kicking everyone’s ass. Of course it also didn’t help that the team roster gave everyone a list of known Ellipsiiis members and these known members would at times appear on EZ and roil the waters.

One theory about Ellipsiiis that was often overlooked was they obviously lived in a world with little noise. They didn’t weather daily assaults from Seraphaem, Kronoshedron and their ilk. If you could cut out the background noise, you might have a chance at matching their predictions.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Most believed that Ellipsiiis couldn’t be beaten. One man thought differently. To beat them, you must duplicate their methods.

Beefjerky started a thread in the Spoilers forum called MESS Tribal Council. MESS was an acronym for Mini Ellipsiiis Survivor Spoilers. His theory was that he couldn’t keep the noise out of the entire spoiler forum but he could damn sure keep it out of one thread. Like a well-aimed rifle wielded by a Zen marksman, the MESS would take a shot at unseating Ellipsiiis.

At the same time MESS was born, I was closely watching another thread begin to take off. I honestly don’t know what the original post said since by the time I took note of it the author, Jitensha, had edited. She felt the need to explain just what the hell a CBT was. CBT stood for Conspiracy Bust Trust. Another play on the well-known Ellipsiiis moniker. With the proliferation of predictions, storyline theories and conspiracies, the inhabitants of CBT became the official skeptics of the Spoiler forum. They didn’t give a crap about anyone and would attempt to tear holes in everything. They went after Ellipsiiis with a vengeance. They absolutely tore through the Angel / Demon contingent. In fact, the only group that they seemed to have a genuine respect for was their new neighbor, The MESS. I guess I shouldn’t make them sound too vicious since they conducted most of their meetings in a state of drunkenness.

Cyber drinking has always fascinated me. I mean, how many of these people are actually drinking the concoctions they are posting about? My guess would be few since I have seen the results of a viciously drunk poster. Most of the people on CBT were far too lucid to be drunk in real life, but they certainly had a good time. They were definitely the party thread. They were also very chatty and had rapidly pushed their thread up into Uncle Camerman territory. We had set a precedent with the Uncle that once a thread reached a certain girth we would not shut it down. We really had no choice but to leave CBT alone and there really was some very good spoiling happening deep in its guts.

The Angels and Devils were becoming more than an annoyance. Seraphaem apparently had friends. Soon other vaguely biblical names began showing up. Abraxas, Asomdeus and the ever so subtle, AndGodSpoke. What really drove us crazy, especially Beefjerky, was that we could tell they didn’t have a clue about what was going to happen, but their posts were tantalizing mysteries. They were littered with references to secret sources and mysterious workings all wrapped in layers of hints, allegations and bible verse. When one would appear, the spoilers would flock to it in droves. Half would try to solve the puzzle; the other half would assault the author as just another hoaxer. It was a tremendous waste of energy.

We had seen no real skirmishes in the Board Wars for several days. It tended to pop up on show days when Ellipsiiis published their predictions and on days when the mainstream press wrote articles mentioning the group, but other than that the topic was mostly quiet. We made every effort to keep the focus on spoiling Survivor and not spoiling Ellipsiiis. Nearby, however, the war raged and was daily becoming more vicious. Every mention by the press and every new prediction led to new accusations of sources, cheating and charges of misconduct. In some lands, I was being very publicly trashed. Vanillaslave, now banned from her homeland, was leading the charge on that front. She accused me of lying, being a pawn for the Ellipsiiis board and causing her demise. Her posts were vicious and her story unfounded. I spoke to her in private but she would not back off. She was convinced that I was part of the grand conspiracy and that I along with it must be brutalized. I once considered her a close friend. After the brutality of her posts in other lands, she became a charter member of a very short list of people that I neither trusted nor liked.

On 4-25, posts began popping up asking what had happened to survivornews.net. Survivornews.net was one of several Survivor resource boards and it was a known fact that it was run by DeepKangaroo. It reported practically everything that happened regarding Survivor. It had also been involved in reporting elements of the board war. I achieved a little notoriety once the site published one of my posts from EZ. I lost my temper one day and commanded all the board war guerillas to get the hell off the board. Survivornews.net was an intergral part of the survivor community and its sudden disappearance was certainly newsworthy to the EZ citizens.

DeepKangaroo appeared shortly after the demise of his website. Understandably he was upset and explained that he was having server problems. With the accusations of DOS attacks, hacking and other mischief flying around, this was not welcome news to me either. I knew it would stir up more conspiracy theories and more board war nonsense.

April 26 would be the penultimate S2 episode. It was also shaping up to be the ultimate spoiler showdown. We watched and we prepared for the night of Spoiler Armageddon.

When the big three came down with their predictions, everyone knew something was up in spoilerville. For the first time in four weeks, the Boston Herald, Jesus and Ellipsiiis picked different bootees.

Jesus hitched his wagon to Colby. During his radio broadcast, the mysterious messiah seemed unsure of himself. Dan and Scott had to practically threaten him to force him to make a prediction. He did eventually, but several days later than he normally did.

The Boston Herald had a right to crow. Weeks before, they had predicted that Elisabeth would make the final four and now she had. Many would be happy to sit on that laurel but once you are hooked on the prediction game, no treatment program in the world will keep you from making that next step. Boldly, stepping into the abyss, The Boston Herald selected Keith as the next to go.

Finally, Ellipsiiis posted its prediction. Everyone in board land liked Elisabeth. Since the ouster of Rodger, she was the one contestant that I think everyone secretly wanted to win. Maybe it was this deep seeded affection that blinded people to the obvious weakness of her position as the last Ogakor. Ellipsiiis picked America’s sweetheart to get the boot.

Three spoilers entered. One would leave. Going into the final show there would be a single undisputed champion of prediction.

To Be Cont…….Next: Off Topic Is The Place To Be


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The Secret Codex of the Spoiler Boards by griftd

Part IX

Elisabeth was gone and so was the hope of keeping EZ isolated from the raging board war.

The Ellipsiiis Brain Trust emerged as the only survivor from the night of spoiler armageddon. Jesus and the Boston Herald had both been wrong. They now joined the junkyard of blown spoilers.

With another correct prediction, indeed with the string of correct predictions, the EBT moved into the limelight. The Boston Herald publicly congratulated them. The rest of the press smelled a story. Soon there were articles about the EBT in the Dallas Morning News, the Washington Post and even USA Today. Fame’s flip side is infamy.

The rumors of EBT having a secret source had been swirling since SurvivorAntarctica’s strange post weeks before. With the correct prediction of Elisabeth, many were now fervently convinced it was true. We only had one episode to go and many doubted there was any way it would be spoiled. The lack of spoilers in this final week combined with the mystery of the EBT caused the storm that was quietly brewing beneath the surface to explode.

The match that lit the fuse was Colby’s mother. She had visited as part of the reward challenge. EBT had predicted this would happen in their summary and many people could see no way it could have been foretold. Possibly even more damaging to the EBT’s case was Colby’s shower. The verbiage of the EBT summary was just too damned close to what Colby had actually said. It was all too convenient for many citizens of EZ.

That night and into the next day, threads popped up all over exploring the EBT mystery. Some went at it like good spoiler detectives. Some went at it like evangelists on a crusade. The debate centered around three main areas: did they have a source? had they lied about having a source? would a source be ethical?

One of the real hard core chargers in all this was pheenix11. To this day, I don’t know if he was serious or not. His posts talked about EBT being part of a grand conspiracy, all part of a grand scheme connected back to Mark Burnett. Pheenix11’s theory was that the evil Mark was using the EBT to distract the Spoilers and would use them to pull the rug out before the final episode. It played right into the paranoia that had been lazily drifting around the board since the infamous final four picture.

There was talk of satellite feeds from Nova Scotia, Asia and even Australia. There was talk of super hackers tapping into CBS and stealing the show summary before it appeared on the site. Pheenix11 even popped up the theory that everything was controlled by Mark Burnett and was part of some crazy online interactive experience. According to him, Ellipsiiis, UncleCamerman and all the angels were involved.

With so many weird characters floating around, it didn’t take long for some to come up with absolutely the most whacked out theory yet. Everything was a massive online role playing game. Seraphaem and Ellipsiiis were the key players in this super secret game. By an unknown method, they were keeping score and it involved the number and quality of their posts on EZ. As strange as this theory was, it made an insane sort of sense. It brought back memories of the EBT thread game, tied it to Seraphaem and packaged it all into the story of the wars of heaven and the fall of Lucifer. St. John stoned out of his mind on the Isle of Patmos couldn’t have written stuff this strange.

We knew we had a problem. In the past when the spoilers starting spoiling Ellipsiiis instead of the show, we simply chastised everyone and locked the thread. We deleted the truly rancid ones. It was pretty effective. Threads kept being created asking about Ellipsiiis but with a frequency that we could handle. This time was definitely different. The threads were proliferating with alarming speed and some big time posters were involved in both sides of the fight. We knew that if we locked these threads, a riot would ensue and we might as well shut the board down. There was no way to simply squash this event.

One of my favorite threads on Off Topic was the “Who is your favorite NHL team?” It just seemed so weirdly out of place. Sometimes I would just look at it sitting there on the front page of the off topic forum and wonder why anyone would ever start a hockey thread on a survivor board. You certainly couldn’t get more off topic. Pheenix11 correctly named the Off Topic forum the DEAD ASS BOARD. During the final week, the Spoilers forum was getting around 3000 hits and 300 posts a day. I don’t think off topic had put up numbers like that in any month. If ever. There was no one there. It was a ghost town except for the resident hockey nuts.

The Ellipsiiis conspiracy threads were threatening to eat the spoiler forum whole. By now, half the threads on the front page were spoiling EBT and not the show. It looked to only get worse. After a brief discussion down in the sewers, a solution arose. Why not just move them all to off topic? They were literally off topic and nobody went to the ghost town forum anyway. That would get all the mess off the spoiler forum and hopefully some of the more rabid posters would follow. With the zealots gone, we could get spoilers back under control.

On April 29th, I personally moved all EBT related threads to the Off Topic Forum.

That woke them up.

Pheenix11 was the first to notice that all the threads had disappeared. He was now convinced more than ever that EBT and Mark Burnett controlled the board. He soon found his threads over in Off Topic and promptly started flaming away at the injustice of these threads being buried in a graveyard.

Of course they weren’t buried. They were right there. Still open. Not locked. Completely intact. In addition to moving all EBT related threads both the present ones and the future ones to Off Topic, we also decided that we would allow almost anything to be posted in off topic. As long as it didn’t cross the usual boundaries of decency, people could rail against the EBT, talk about conspiracies and even scream about how unfair the admins were. Everything would be fair game in off topic land.

I certainly got toasted a few times. I had my detractors and at time would even get “hate” mail. I found most of it pretty amusing. I kept my mouth shut and let them wail away about what a big meanie I was. The only times I would step in was when clarification was needed on an admistrative matter. For example, not long after the thread move, DeepKangaroo showed up stating that since EBT moderators controlled the board, the threads were moved in an obvious attempt to continue the obfuscation. I politely explained that it was an administrative decision since these threads were threatening to kill the spoiler forum. I should have seen DK’s arrival and his not so veiled flame as an indication that participants from both sides of the Board War were waiting to jump in the mix. Unfortunately, I missed the boat on that one.

I also found a new weapon. Humor. It was easy to get angry. Many of these threads were trashing me. I was used to it so I didn’t mind. Many were also trashing some very good friends of mine. That I minded a great deal. Experience had shown me that replying angrily would only reinforce the theory that the board was controlled by EBT. So I started using humor.

Stylemaster2001 also had a pretty good sense of humor. Although I did snap at him once, I knew that he was simply enjoying the whole conspiracy thing and couldn’t resist poking fun at EBT. Once he asked, if the EBT did no spoiling and just waited for their source to tell them what happened, what did they do all week? I responded that we all sat around and stared at the fire. It was a reference to a Colby line from the show. I don’t think anyone got it.

The Spoilers forum was finally coming around. Except for those damned angels and devils, it was comfortably coming back on topic.

Down the road at Off Topic things were rumbling, tumbling and getting weirder.

Ellipsiiis herself even showed up. The namesake of the mysterious board posted a link to the newly minted EBT FAQ. It was detailed. It explained a lot. It never denied the existence of a source. It was well intended but probably had little effect. Ellipsiiis didn’t post any more after posting the link.

At a neighboring board someone claimed to have a name of the EBT source. Now that name started leaking into all the conversations.

Back over in spoilers, Beefjerky was fighting his personal battles with the Angels and Demons. Finally he could stand it no longer. He started locking their threads. He didn’t move them to off topic and this caused some consternation among certain people. Frankly, we were sick of Serapheam, Kronoshedron and their whole brood. Their threads would inevitably take spoilers off topic again and they refused to go away. They posted links to mystery web sites, they posted long ramblings and they posted material that we knew was patently false. It was like some massive game. Finally, Beefjerky reached his limit and let the axe fall. He banned Seraphaem, Kronoshedron, Asmodeus and their entire ilk.

It would be nice if the story of Angels and Demons ended there but it didn’t. Many had already seen the link to a website that was supposed to reveal all if you were able to solve the puzzles. We deleted the link but there was no stopping the curious. Several days later, the final Serapheam prank was pulled and it was a nasty one. The puzzle would allegedly be solved if you entered the correct password. Many tried and were met with a rude surprise. Put in the wrong password and browser windows started popping open until your computer froze and crashed. Word quickly spread. Some just couldn’t resist the temptation and continued working on the puzzle. The password was finally solved and it revealed, well the only way to put it would be a bunch of nonsense. More preaching and ramblings that didn’t make a lick of sense.

Stylemaster started a thread in Off Topic called Sunday Night Séance. Like Uncle Camerman and CBT before them, the off topic crew now had a central place to focus on the one thing they loved: spoiling Ellipsiiis.

Of course our resident witch couldn’t resist. Owen jumped into this thread with both feet, posting chants, wishing everyone a Happy Beltane and generally having a good time. There was talk about rituals and gay Disney cows and some other things that I still don’t know what the hell have to do with anything. Owen’s presence and willingness to play quelled a great deal of the actual nastiness surrounding the EBT source controversy.

With Off Topic under Owen’s wing, or maybe I should say cloak, I felt pretty comfortable just sitting back and waiting for the next explosion to occur. We were just days away from the finale and I knew it was coming. The only questions were where and when.

To Be Con’t……………Next: The Gator Strikes Back


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The Secret Codex of the Spoiler Boards by griftd

Part X


The war was contained but far from over.

We were rid of the Angels and Demons but their droppings still set off the occasional stink bomb. The Ellipsiiis matter was not so easily corralled. It still leaked onto the Spoiler board but it was rare. Most of it was now kept safely on Off Topic. Most of the posters in that forum were having a good time with it and frankly I no longer cared.

I had spent the previous four weeks walking a razor’s edge. Now that the end was in sight, I was tired and a little frayed. I literally started counting the days until the final show. This thing that I had once enjoyed so much had become my Sisyphus stone. I would start rolling it up each week only to see it roll back down on Thursday. Every Monday, I would begin the long trek up the hill again.

We were only three days from the final show and the discussion of an inside source at Ellipsiiis still raged.

Most of the talk was by what had become the off topic crew. It was sometimes serious, sometimes silly and for the most part, harmless. Anyone, however, could tell we were walking on a bed of barely cool coals and all it would take was one shot of gasoline.

Many of the old time posters were showing up with more frequency now that the discussion centered on Ellipsiiis. Like long lost actors of a forgotten passion play, they wandered back to EZ and let loose on each other. Some were known Ellipsiiis me