Posts by Benjamin Taylor90

Zachary Davis47 said:I didn't really get where people were coming from either, until someone pointed out: just imagine if Wiki actually became a moderator on this board...

That’s when it clicked for me. Everything suddenly made sense. There isn't any force on earth that could make me type a single word if Wiki were running the show...

That's basically how some of these folks feel about Lacy. It's as simple as that.

I get it. If only those internet warriors were half as enthusiastic when various Republican Party caricatures are looting the country. 😢

Like I said, kid stuff. ☕

mistyhound94 said:Nobody attacked ruggedscout76, so quit the nonsense. Daniel Kelly57 explained everything perfectly and hit the nail right on the head. If you’ve never actually met Lottie, you don't know the full story here. And now it's clear how the forum owner acts like some high school kid, trying to act all sophisticated while pushing irrelevant topics onto subforums where they don't belong. I guess that's why this whole thread feels like I'm just talking to a brick wall. It's pathetic.

Everyone jumped on ruggedscout76 just because she changed the chat name while she was literally just trying to handle complaints diplomatically. Now we’ve reached the peak theory that this whole mess is just Lottie’s little drama and ruggedscout76 is nothing more than a tiny, grumpy pawn. In the process, Mary got trampled too, even though the chat had the exact same name—get this—under the Earthquake PDF. 🙏
Besides, ruggedscout76 ended up pulling back entirely because of this whole circus.

The Admin has been having these "visions" ever since he started showing up more frequently after the start of COVID. Just look at FEMA... But sure, he’s doing it all for Lottie. 🤣

From the Admin to Lottie, down to how the chatters reacted... it's all just childish behavior. 🙂

In three months, I'll put together an analysis of the US and post it here on FEMA, just so we can decide if Lottie was a good or bad choice. Naturally, chats won't be included in that analysis because chats are useless filler for any forum. That's it. ☕

Daniel Kelly57 said:It isn't about them being "forbidden" from saying things. It's simpler than that: they just don't like her as a person in real life and they don't want her having any authority over them. If you actually listen to what I'm saying, it's pretty easy to wrap your head around. They were happy when Lucy and ruggedscout76 were running things, and they don't get why everything had to change. Besides, you can see exactly what's happening on the USA forums right now. You aren't blind. Suddenly there's an army of mods patrolling the USA boards, even though a month ago they barely knew the USA existed. You think mistyhound94 is being a hypocrite? He's not the only one who reacted this way, and you have to respect that. 🍿

Thank God I'm not. Even ruggedscout76 got targeted here. Enough said for anyone with half a brain. ☕

Daniel Kelly57 said:Who actually spent years hanging out with those people? Let's not exaggerate. Personal issues basically caused most of the crew to go off the rails because they were set up to be trendy, plain and simple. Honestly, the way it went down wasn't right, but Andy owns this forum and he can host whoever he wants. There isn't much we can do about it. We either deal with it or just walk away. Some people already left. Others stayed, and that's just how it is. Nobody here is being a hypocrite. 🍿

Oh, give me a break! The users are spiraling into this conspiracy theory where Lacy is some big mastermind suppressing free speech—allegedly, because apparently, talking about food is "banned" now, even though that’s barely what anyone talks about outside of the main chat anyway. If this weren't so ridiculous, it would actually be pathetic. 😂

I’m just not following these points:

1. A bunch of chatters used to hang out with Latica in real life, and fine, no big deal. But then Latica gets appointed moderator and suddenly everyone loses their minds? 😵

2. Has she actually done anything as a mod yet? Handed out bans, deleted posts, anything? No, because she hasn't even had the chance to step into the role. Besides, most of these offended chatters aren't even posting in the main US threads; they're just venting in the chat, which none of the mods have even bothered to touch. For what it's worth, I'm still an asshole in the US threads, and Latica isn't stopping me or telling me how to write. 😂
There's no point in talking about her performance as a mod until her moderation actually impacts the US section (like what I did here: ) or until the community feedback starts piling up. Until then, this complaining is just noise.

3. They went after Shadow, claiming she's under the influence of Masons, lizard people, or whatever conspiracy nonsense is trending today. So, basically, you're attacking someone you've been buddies with in real life for years just because of some trivial online title and a wild theory. You're attacking the same person who apologized to me for giving me a warning just because I greeted an entire family tree like a total idiot. Come on!

From where I'm sitting, this group of chatters looks incredibly hypocritical. You guys took this way too far. ☕

Personally, I wouldn't take a mod job even if they paid me. There are days when I'd rather just clock out and walk away entirely, yet you all act like it's a crisis just because Latica volunteered for the headache. It's not that deep. If you actually care, show some sympathy. 🤣

The counter needs to go, completely. 🧐 ☕

#sorrywiki 🤣

Look, don't worry about saving a dime for my sake. Honestly, I wouldn't mind if another $15,000 just vanished into thin air. 🐔

ambergull said:The fundamental source of all these misunderstandings is simply bad communication. ☕

One person makes a comment, another misinterprets it, and immediately there is a fiery, temperamental response.
If everyone would just take the time to read a bothersome post twice with a bit of nuance, perhaps these reactions wouldn't be so extreme. We should feel free to express our own opinions, yes, but shouldn't we also respect those of others? Wouldn't the world be incredibly dull if we all shared the exact same thoughts and perspectives?

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy A50 using Reddit

Basically, yeah.

Jeremy Johnson18 is throwing a tantrum because everyone ignores him sometimes. He doesn't get that we all have days where we feel—well, ignored. 🤣

I mean, there are literally days when I'm in a bad mood and I write complete garbage, whether I realize it or not, so the people who are actually being rational that day just steer clear. So what? Am I supposed to start new threads just to call them out? 🤣

Then again, at Jeremy Johnson18's age, I’d probably get my head handed to me. It's that stage of life where you lose it if someone doesn't reply the exact second you see they've read your message. 🤣

Jeremy Johnson18 said:Do you ever feel like some people are intentionally misreading every single thing posted?

Like today, you ask a simple question: "What drew you to the USA?"
And instead, they start attacking people who aren't even part of the conversation, bringing up stuff that has zero to do with the topic. All because the PDF file was titled Lonely Hearts. 🤣

1. Nowhere does it say the USA group is exclusively for singles. It literally says it's for Lonely Hearts. You can be lonely because you lost your cat!
2. After they wrote that they aren't lonely and are happy with their lives, you called them out for talking nonsense. Look, fine, but if you approach things from the premise that people are lying, you're going to hit resistance. No point acting surprised when things go downhill. Action and reaction.

You're alright, but sometimes you sound like a moody 14-year-old. Sorry, but you do. 🙂

brisksurfer19 said:That’s just being a jerk.

🙂 😘

That was a compliment! 🧐

Ashley Vaughn79 said:No, I don't have her either.

I'm reading through everything. 😁

That team as well. 😁

I guess I'll just stay quiet about how this whole thread looks to me and what's actually being said here.
My impression.

Nice, keep it coming... please. 🙂 😁

Why does it always seem like we Americans end up looking like savages on Reddit?
Is it just me, or is everyone feeling a bit embarrassed in front of the admins? 🤦 🙈

We aren't even that far off! The only people constantly flooding the boards with these political flame wars are the alternative guys. And let's be real, that's a crowd that would probably threaten to end it all over a forum debate about organic kale! 😂

Jeremy Johnson18 said:I'll get around to updating my signature when I actually have a spare second.
Let's try being a little more chill about this.

Look, I can't stand most of these people either, but I think the real issue here is just garbage communication on this forum. Someone cracks a joke, someone else takes it way too seriously, and suddenly everyone's throwing accusations around.
Then we end up in these pointless arguments where half the time we don't even know what started it.

I’ve honestly walked away from conversations before just because some guy had a ridiculous avatar and I decided he was a moron, so there's no point in wasting my breath. 🤦

If I were stuck in a room with Hitler, you, and two bullets, I’d spend both of them on you. 🙂

🙂

Aside from Deva, it looks like you've successfully managed to alienate all the harmless, nice people on this forum. Congrats on the achievement! 🤣

Jeremy Johnson18 said:Hey there, forum admins.

Since they’ve completely trashed the Lonely Heart scene by flooding it with all those random meetup and party threads, us real US-ers are basically left with nowhere to go.
If I remember correctly, the US was originally designed to be some kind of sanctuary for singles. Fast forward to today, and like 90% of the people there are paired up and playing house—most of them don't even have anything to do with that PDF.
It’s reached the point where certain people just wanted to break away and set up a "real American chat" over in the off-topic section, but even there, the trolls keep crawling out of the woodwork to harass us.

Can we please just have one tiny corner of this forum where we can actually hang out at the end of the day without all these coupled-up, blissfully happy people rubbing salt in our wounds?

Pise:
Lonely Heart
Lonely Hearts Club Band

It doesn't say:
Lonely Heart
The single Hearts Club band connection.

A relationship just isn't a magic fix-all. It can't check every single box or satisfy every single need a person has. Honestly, you can be right in the middle of a committed partnership and still feel like a total Lonely Heart. ☕

Stop obsessing over everyone else's relationship statuses on this forum. That’s not your problem. You need to deal with your own demons instead. Forget the chat rooms—focus on yourself for once. No amount of online banter or some random single guy is ever going to fill that void you're carrying around. ☕

Donna Watson65 said:Look, kid, I actually "escaped" this forum for a while because people like you ruined everything. You didn't just mess up the official US chat; you trashed the 40+ thread too—which was supposed to be our little sanctuary for people who actually have their lives together. But somehow, you still managed to barge into our conversations whenever you felt like it, even though you didn't meet any of the criteria and, frankly, you didn't belong there.

It’s pretty much a foregone conclusion now: the 40+ chat is about to merge with your infantile, zero-stimulus micro-niche. Honestly, any semblance of intellectual variety that was actually worth nurturing has basically vanished, all because you decided to colonize the entire PDF.

It’s not like we didn't complain. Honestly, I think even the boss expressed his frustration through some sort of cryptic, poetic nonsense. But it didn't matter. We spent all that time repainting the whole damn place just to end up retreating to wherever the hell we ended up.

The vibe is way better now. People are actually hanging out outdoors and having decent chats online. I’m not delusional enough to think the 40+ crowd is ever going to reclaim their old "home base," but that doesn't mean killjoys like you need to have every ridiculous demand met.

If you think everyone over 40 on this forum is dead, you’re wrong. You're just gone. But let's be honest—it’s not like we were lacking in the mutual mockery department. You guys have spent years hunting down every single person over 40 who dared to talk about anything other than wine connoisseurship. It's like trying to have a conversation at a Napa Valley tasting without someone bringing up vintage profiles. I don't know what level you're talking about. You haven't given me anything to work with here.Not exactly a hallmark of intelligence, is it? Public chat.. 🙏 🙂
Talking about food, pizza, and sex is just rotting my brain. We were discussing... Fine. Wine or K-plus Lowenbrau. Smart people know how to eat, drink, and handle their business in bed. The rest? They just sit around philosophizing. 🙂

I didn't jump in myself, just lurked and read along. Honestly, some of those threads were actually pretty interesting. 🙂

Jack Cook7 said:Look, man, I totally get where you're coming from. 😉

Listen, buddy, let’s stick to something simple, like kicking a soccer ball around. You might actually manage to navigate a 3D space without tripping over your own feet, let alone trying to wrap your head around the fourth or fifth dimension.

Honey, besides just acting like you don't know anything and throwing a tantrum, you're also out here bragging about how many years you've wasted. 🙂

Jack Cook7 said:...

Give me a break, don't go turning into some offended little princess here. 🐔

Personally, I think embed content is a total nuisance, but like they say, this isn't the Stone Age. I can deal with it, provided that autoplay is set to OFF! ☕

Jack Cook7 said:When you "embed" images or videos, everything gets proxied through the forum's own servers—or at least that's how some setups work. It absolutely hammers the bandwidth, the CPU, and the memory. Most of this stuff is just memes or nonsense anyway. From the perspective of having an actual, meaningful discussion, it's trivial, yet it eats up 99.9% more resources.

Could you expand on that? I'm not entirely sure I follow your logic here.

Embedding content doesn't actually tax the server. The bulk of embedded content relies on JavaScript and runs clientside, meaning the heavy lifting happens on the user's machine. Loading speed depends exclusively on the end-user's hardware and internet connection. ☕

When vBulletin converts a YouTube link or other media into embed/HTML code, it uses Regex. PHP can churn through those operations millions of times a second without even breaking a sweat on the server side.

Honestly, the biggest drain on the server right now is that archaic, useless member list. GoogleBot and its crew are crawling the server 24/7. 🙏

The real reason the forum is struggling is due to a poorly optimized database and the fact that vBulletin is garbage—it uses MySQL in ways that MySQL was never intended to be used. To crash this forum, I would need exactly a few dozen GET requests. Hardcore! 🙏 🙏

Seriously? 🤣

Whoever wrote this clearly has no idea what they're talking about. GoogleBot doesn't care about latency. 🤣

That moment when the guy starting a thread about being wild... actually goes off the rails. 🙏 🙏 😂 😂

briskbison55 said:Look, just read that third sentence in the first row and adjust the therapy accordingly. Did you actually write down everything those guys said? I mean, just get it all out, vent whatever you need to, and then move on. Honestly, if it weren't for your biased moderator, maybe you could actually respond in the chat, but I guess you guys are all way too high-and-mighty over there to deal with people just being blunt and unfiltered.

Top-tier communication skills right there. And then you wonder why people get banned. 🤣

briskbison55 said:Yeah, I guess I’m the one looking foolish here, but I seriously can't get anyone to actually address the basic economic principles you guys keep bringing up. Like, seriously, just walk with me for a second... what I really want to know is why a moderator in this chat thread is out here pushing one specific option while labeling everyone else as trolls.

Wand isn't "taking sides." They aren't even trolling or being provocative. If anything, their posts are incredibly biased—but they're high-quality bias.

Then there's you, jumping into threads to back up someone who clearly lost touch with reality, saying stuff like Bravo, peak logic, too bad these people are too dim to get it. It’s just a constant loop. 🤣

I might be the one trolling and poking the bear, but you're out here winning the "most delusional" award. 🙏

briskbison55 said:I mean, I honestly didn't expect anyone to actually say anything, so I’m kind of wondering what the big deal is here. I only started this thread to give the skeptics a place to hang out so they'd stay away from the main Bitcoin discussion—you know, where all those dreamers who think money grows on trees spend their time. We were just trying to move them over since this was an open chat. Now I'm getting docked 100 points just because it's a chat thread? I guess maybe I misread the room.

Was getting roasted over on Cryptocurrency not enough for you? Now you’ve decided to come over to the Politics sub and try to embarrass yourself here too? 🙏

northernviper4 said:To put it bluntly, the whole mess started the very second we all clicked "agree" to the community guidelines😬

Let me be perfectly clear: if they would just delete the user profile entirely, I wouldn't care one bit about what happens to the individual posts...

Anyway, I’m curious—why the obsession with deleting everything? 🍿

You post, you get bored, you stop posting. It's not rocket science. What's actually gained by wiping the slate clean?🤔

Donna Doyle2 said:Honestly, I’ve been wondering about this exact same thing!

From everything I've gathered from the replies so far, it doesn't even seem like a matter of technical limitations, does it? It feels more like these are intentional policies set by the platform itself!

And I just can't wrap my head around how that would somehow compromise integrity—plus, I'm dying to know what the legal basis for all of this actually is! Does that mean the posts we've written here are essentially the property of the site, leaving us with absolutely no say in what happens to our own words?

Nope, it’s not a technical issue. ☕

If you go around deleting posts, you end up gutting every single thread that person ever touched. You strip away all the context, and half the time, it just looks like everyone else is shouting into a void or talking to themselves. 😂

Any forum that actually values its own structure won't let you just wipe posts. Instead, they do a "deletion" where they just swap out the username for deleted user.

mistybison said:On USA, you can wipe everything—both posts and profiles—and it remains the largest global forum with hundreds of millions of users...

I don't see why it would be an issue to effectively "deactivate" a username so that the posts remain, even if the profile itself is gone and cannot be searched or used anymore. 🤔 This wouldn't compromise the quality of the discussions. Ultimately, the substance of the conversation should matter more than the specific person who wrote it.

USA isn't a forum.

mistybison said:On USA, you can wipe everything—both posts and profiles—and it remains the largest global forum with hundreds of millions of users...

I don't see why it would be an issue to effectively "deactivate" a username so that the posts remain, even if the profile itself is gone and cannot be searched or used anymore. 🤔 This wouldn't compromise the quality of the discussions. Ultimately, the substance of the conversation should matter more than the specific person who wrote it.

It's strictly forum policy.

northernviper4 said:That is precisely what I was wondering about... I had suspected for some time now that a total purge of both posts and the username probably isn't feasible. I had harbored a bit of hope that an administrator might be able to scrub the username while letting the content remain, as the posts themselves don't bother me...

I am in complete agreement!

The username in your own posts? Sure. But the username inside posts where people quote you? No. Because of how the forum is built, the only way to pull that off is by manually messing around with the database.

It’s not about being outdated; it’s about the fact that letting people wipe their profiles would basically gut the integrity of the whole forum. Most boards that claim to allow deletions usually just let you scrub your handle while keeping the actual posts intact—meaning your username just gets swapped out for Deleted user.