Look, if the kid has moved on, we should just assume he’s done his damage and won't be spamming anymore. There's really no reason to keep a site buried in a digital grave. It actually caught me off guard recently when I hit a wall trying to access The New York Times and TinyURL; I was just trying to share a piece about the destruction of a historic Steam Engine, which is basically a protected landmark and one of those iconic spots everyone loves to photograph in downtown Washington, D.C. By the time the story finally surfaced on other news outlets, I had already struggled through three different attempts using a bit.ly shortener just to get the link to work.
What happens when someone actually tries to share an article from a local news site—like I tried to do the other day regarding some crucial report on the destruction of a major landmark in Washington, D.C., which wasn't covered by any mainstream outlet and might still be buried elsewhere?
First, you end up with those annoying asterisks because you hyperlinked specific words instead of just pasting the raw link, then you get a warning that the link is invalid, so you fix it, only to find out it’s rejected again because one of the most common URL shorteners is blocked, forcing you to hunt for a different service... It's just exhausting.
Filtering URLs isn't exactly a thrilling pastime unless we're talking about blocking malicious sites spreading malware or those old-school shock sites. If someone is blatantly spamming ads, then ban them and wipe their posts; don't resort to censoring legitimate links. What am I supposed to do, start a burner account and pretend to "promote" some random site like "Business Insider" only to watch it hit the blacklist too? Should I just keep making new accounts and trying different outlets until it becomes impossible to link anything from American media here? And then repeat the whole cycle with the top ten most popular URL shorteners? 😁
I tried posting a link to a local news outlet earlier and got flagged. Then I used a TinyURL to mask it, just to get hit with the same thing. It wasn't until I switched over to Bitly that the system actually let it through. Is there some sort of blacklist somewhere detailing which sites this forum decides to censor?
I’ll step in here for a moment, though I know I’m jumping into the fray, but when you see an administrator being called an idiot only to have someone register a new account under that same admin's name just to claim they've read official moderator PMs—only to follow up that "you're a favorite around here" sentiment with a two-month suspension instead of a permanent ban—it starts to feel incredibly off. Throw in a public welcome message from one of the moderators asking a previously banned user to give her a call, and the whole situation looks bizarrely lopsided, as if the rulebook isn't applied equally to everyone. It would look much different if this individual didn't used to sport a colorful username and maintain such close ties with half the staff here.
Look, if any of the admins or mods actually knows exactly what was written in there, just hit me up via DM and we can wrap this thread up. I have no intention of leaking 🙂
My inbox is sitting there half-full, yet there isn't a single message to be found despite receiving an alert that one had arrived. It feels like we're looking at either a fundamental glitch in the system architecture, or perhaps the user was hit with a permanent ban for cloning—where you see a single forum post and then the profile just turns gray instantly—or maybe the admins have been sweeping through and wiping out all sent messages altogether.
It’s gone, plain and simple—it just isn't there anymore. Either we're looking at some kind of glitch in the Manhattan system, or one of the admins decided to pull the plug and wipe it out.