While another forum dweller was trying to chase me off of the forum, another one was chasing others away. There were series of unfortunate events going on on at the “nameless” forum. Like a member turned moderator abusing his power on the whole message board. This guy was far worse than our Camui fanatic.

After showing my presence on the forum a couple of moths after joining, I noticed another member who had the same number of posts as Camuicon worshiper. He was no threat to me or the others. He seemed real informative, although he was a total fanboy. He was so popular, that in a few months, he was elected moderator! “Congratulations!” I thought. I take it back. After being promoted, he was very quiet and other members went about their discussions. Three months since his promotion, my time on the forum was running out.

He started posting in every thread on the forum. Not only they were his witty, informative posts, they were nasty posts. Very bossy posts. Like in the role-playing forum, he informed the participants that the place wasn’t a chat-room and they could face consequences if they broke the rule. Since that post was made, the “chat” posts in the threads were minimized. Another forum had suffered from his furious rules and regulations. It was the Feedback forum. The “heart and soul” of the whole community. Everyday before his new job, everyone would leave feedbacks and report problems. Everyday. That was about to come to an end. He would lock threads that “didn’t follow the forum” though it did. Within weeks, the feedback forum was a ghost town. There were no new posts in the last two weeks.

That’s not all he did. He would delete legitimate posts in threads. He deleted a post of mine hinting that if other people besides the TC requests a forum for an anime series, it would happen. Perhaps I was “imitating” a moderator, but I have seen someone else [not a moderator] said the same thing and didn’t get into trouble. Why did mine have to be deleted?! However, I wasn’t the only one getting their posts deleted. The forum had a contest during the Christmas holiday. A poster replied to a post in the thread for the contest that was legitimate. It was deleted and another moderator reminded her that she was “being off-topic”…

Months after joining the forum, I created a club to my favorite anime series. Clubs were the big thing on the forum–at the time. It was a club based on an anime that the forum had already had a forum for general discussions on the series. At that time, there was no rule on having a club for a series that has a forum for it already–until after our witty and informative fanboy joined the moderating team. My club stayed around for a year and two months. Very good for a series that had ended a couple of years before the creation of the club. One day I noticed something very horrible…The club was gone! No more. Nonexistent. It was unbelievable. One of the requirements for having a club is that it must be very active. Otherwise, after a month of no activity, it would be deleted. There was little activity in the club, with a recent post a few days before its deletion. Was my club delete because I had a image linked in a thread from another site that is not on theirs? I wonder if WIF-san had anything to do with it.

Immediately after the deletion of my club, I faded away from the forums and never looked back. I stopped visiting the forum in June 2004 and haven’t returned since, including avoiding the forum in search results from Google and the like. Not only I was the victim of WIF-san’s injustice, everyone else suffered the same fate and attendance dropped. I do not know the current situation of the community since I haven’t been back since 2004. The forum is still around, but with a new generation of people. The class of 2003 is gone. I wonder how are the new generation Otaku are taking the community?