IRC Is Not Your Kingdom

It really pisses me off when ops on IRC go on some kind of power trip, kicking out anybody who says something “bad” about them. It doesn’t matter if it’s an IRCop running the network or just a lowly op helping out with running a channel. If you start kicking out people because of some petty little thing like that, you’re a jerk. Now, if a user is being really abusive, I can understand that, because an abusive user needs to be kicked out no matter who the target is. But I think it’s inexcusable to look the other way when person X says bad things about person Y, but kick them out if instead they say the same sort of things about you.

You see, your duties as an op are to moderate the network or channel, not to get fellow chatters to fellate you. I have seen channels that became shadows of their former selves because the head op apparently expected the chatters to suck his dick. Well, the chatters didn’t come to suck your dick, they came to chat to each other about stuff. If you run an IRC channel, the channel isn’t about you unless, well, it actually is about you. For instance, if I’m running a channel called #omgwtflol (to make up a completely random example; I’m sure there is a channel with that name somewhere, but I’m not talking about it), I should not treat it as if it were called #furrykef. If I actually am running #furrykef, I suppose maybe then it would be somewhat reasonable to make the denizens obey my whims.

By the way, exactly the same things apply to moderators of forums, too, though I’ve rarely had this problem on forums. About the only forum with fascist administration I’ve visited is GameFAQs, but they’re really bad about it. I had an entire thread deleted because I had something like “TEH SCUK!!!11” in the title (completely joking, of course) and this violated some rule I didn’t know about that said you can’t say “sucks” in a topic title, which would be auto-censored, and if you bypass the auto-censor, your thread gets deleted. Geez, couldn’t you just rename it? How was I supposed to know that? (Yes, yes, there are rules, but they could be a bit more understanding.) And this doesn’t even touch the surface of the problems of GameFAQs moderators…I heard one guy got banned from the forums for saying “i r 9!!!11” or something like that in a “post your age” thread (you must be at least 13 to use the forums), despite obviously not being 9 years old and having even posted to the contrary earlier. Such stupid rule enforcement benefits nobody. Sorry…I guess I strayed from the point, but I really hate such idiocy.