> Imagine having to pay $10 to register a 4chan or reddit account and being banned for silly and ridiculous rule infractions but then being allowed back on if you registered another account("10bux").

IMHO, that's one of the best features of the forums. I first joined in 2003, didn't read the rules, posted garbage, and got banned. I ended up making a new account avoid having the embarrassment of being banned. Later on they ended up loosing the rules a bit and came out with probations.

Also, that $10 went towards the costs of running the website/forums. When SA came out there was no AWS, they had to lease cabinet space in a colo facility and buy real servers. The website/forums was actually down for while when Hurricane Katrina hit, (their colo was in downtown New Orleans at the time).

I remember their sysadmin posting from the colo facility while the post-Katrina chaos was going on.

> Basically. Imagine having to pay $10 to register a 4chan or reddit account and being banned for silly and ridiculous rule infractions but then being allowed back on if you registered another account("10bux").

Flip side, the paid account system means that banned trolls coming back under a different username doesn't happen nearly as often as it would on other platforms. It still does for sure, there are a couple of people who apparently have no problem throwing cash at the forums to be able to post their nonsense, but it's not really a big thing. The vast majority of users pay their 10 bucks once, maybe buy a few upgrades, and then never pay a cent more.

I've been on the forums since the early 2000s and have honestly never seen frivolous bans as a thing. 6 hour probations are sometimes thrown around like candy, but they're mostly meaningless unless you do something stupid in response.

In the end, the ban list is public so the system has a lot of transparency. If you know what your friend's username was you can see the exact post that earned it, as well as their history of infractions, and what mods/admins were involved. https://forums.somethingawful.com/banlist.php

> I knew a guy who was huge into SA and contributed a lot of their photoshop Friday threads. One time there was a thread about a new movie, most people liked it but he simply said "I just left the theater a few hours ago, I didn't really dig it" he was immediately banned for "trolling" simply for sharing his opinion. He was the biggest SA user I knew at the time.

I certainly can't say it didn't happen, there were definitely some less stable mods and of course the subject of this thread was the top admin for most of the forums' life, but my experience tells me that your friend was likely not entirely honest with you about why they got banned.

>I certainly can't say it didn't happen, there were definitely some less stable mods and of course the subject of this thread was the top admin for most of the forums' life, but my experience tells me that your friend was likely not entirely honest with you about why they got banned.

Keep in mind I am talking about something that happened back in 2003. I long ago lost touch with this person. He was SA's biggest cheerleader and he couldn't believe I didn't have an SA forums account since I am a huge computer nerd that spent countless hours on multiple forums in those days and SA was the "place to be" back then.

He actually did show me a screenshot of the post that got him banned and I couldn't believe he got banned over that. No profanity, calling people names, nothing that got you banned from most forums. He was just calmly explaining why he thought a movie he had just seen that day wasn't very good in his opinion. He did register another account since his whole online life was based on SA at the time. By the time I thought about maybe registering an SA account it was already on the way out as being the center of internet culture.

One thing I could never figure out back in the day was SA's burning hatred of FARK.com. I used to go there just to skim the news and check out the comments. Apparently admitting liking FARK on SA was a big no no and would get you relentlessly mocked.

Again this is all ancient 15+ year old drama at this point.

Vilerat banned me once for calling Hamid Karzai a restaurateur. I never figured out why that was worth one.

I thought it was Karzai's brother who operated a restaurant, in Baltimore ("The Helmand")?

Yes, I believe I did mention his brother now that I think about it.

I've been a forums member since 2006. The SA forums are my home on the Internet. It's definitely had its ups-and-downs, as you describe. But the forums have taken me through all of my major hobbies and interests, from video games and Internet culture, to cars, to music, to guitar. I've even made real-life friendships there. I think over the past few years, and especially since the ownership transition last year, the forums have been in a bit of a golden age. Even if you've been turned off by historical decisions, I'd really strongly suggest joining and tuning in to some of the subforums that are related to your interests. It's a really great set of communities, and overall is actually a really welcoming and progressive community, especially compared to the lowest-common-denominator free-for-all that current ad-based social media promotes.

I might check it out since it is under new ownership. The era of SA I knew of was 1999-2003. I haven't thought very much about SA in a long time. I started using 4chan in like 2008 and didn't even know it was made by a former SA user till I bothered to look into the history of 4chan.

Hahaha, I was on 4chan from around 2003-2006. Our Internet histories are inverses :P

Haha I remember you, YOSPOS ftw

edit: your blog is cool, nice cheese and table

> One time there was a thread about a new movie, most people liked it but he simply said "I just left the theater a few hours ago, I didn't really dig it" he was immediately banned for "trolling" simply for sharing his opinion.

One of the best things about the moderation culture at SA was that they came down hard on facile, thoughtless half-posts like the one you describe. It tended to result in vibrant threads full of people who actually had something to say.

Since banning ended up being a big part of their revenue model, I think an interesting approach they could have took was to allow you to re-instate your existing account if you were banned for $10, instead of having to register a completely new account. That would have avoided the chaos of losing users that had reputation while still kind of working for their odd moderation and revenue system. They could have also, of course, just made the $10 an annual thing and solved it that way too, but that just seems clinical to the madness that made the forum entertaining, and the banning kind of played into the humor.

I'll out here that my work is very strongly influenced by Something Awful and I had an account there a very long time ago. I was banned by Zack Parsons for I don't even remember what post (nothing any reasonable person would think deserved a ban), and that was the end of my participation in the SA forums, I didn't want to have to re-build an identity from scratch there and I decided to move on, for better or worse.

That was the way normal bans worked. Pay :tenbux: and get your account reactivated. Permabans, which generally required really toxic* behavior were "we never want to see you on this site again." and you weren't supposed to re-register an account at all.

*Over the years Rich was running the site it seemed like "criticism of the mods" more frequently became a perma-bannable offense.

e: f, b.

I don't recall it always being this way, but I may have just been mistaken at the time.

> I think an interesting approach they could have took was to allow you to re-instate your existing account if you were banned for $10, instead of having to register a completely new account

That is how it works

https://secure.somethingawful.com/products/unban.php