I was out drinking last night at Brewerks when I received an sms telling me that nocturne has written several posts criticizing Daphne. It was even more amusing that when I accidentally clicked on the favorite (since removed) in my browser, I saw that these posts have gotten into Top 10:

Apparently, nocturne has re-posted his old post on Daphne, and posted an “apology” as well. In either case, nocturne spoke the things about Daphne that probably many people – with the exception of bloggers xueyu82 and a_x – wanted to say but didn’t have the moral courage to do so.

Now the question is, will nocturne enter ping.sg’s Hall of Dishonor – otherwise known as the ‘Ban of Brothers’ for daring to ‘swat the fly on the head of the tiger’ [老虎头上拍苍蝇]? Whatever the end result is, it no longer matters. If nocturne is banned, it simply reinforces what some of us already believed / known as a fact – that the management of ping.sg tolerates no criticisms. If nocturne is not banned, then well, what’s so different in nocturne’s case from that of dk? It begs the question why this is treated as yet another private dispute among bloggers even when certain comments appears to be even more divisive and harmful than dk’s post. I quote:

Now, if anyone would allow me, the main justification for dk’s banishment from the Garden of “Pingden” was that he committed the ‘cardinal sin’ of saying he has given up on the community after he had simply pointed out that the thoughtless comments Daphne made can be viewed as divisive.

If the well being of the community is of paramount importance, then is ‘not giving a shit about the community’ not a even more ‘heinous crime’? Why the disparity in treatment for both cases? Why the double standards? It begs the question why dk was made an example of, simply for speaking up at the clearly obvious divisive actions – intentional or not – of Daphne?

Is nocturne going to be spared just because he only blogged and ping his posts and never comment on the forum? Or that he is not really known in real life to most users on ping.sg? Really, when dk was banned, I had actually found it ridiculous that dk gets a denial of service simply because he has ‘given up on the community’ . Frankly, when was ‘community participation’ and ‘concern for the community’ ever a requirement for using ping.sg’s services? Perhaps Uzyn should just ban the rest of the non-active members which just ping their posts for traffic and never participate at all in the community because they did with action what nocturne did with words – I don’t give a shit about your precious ‘community’. And that’s not mentioning all those members without a blog listed in or have their blogs removed from their registered accounts.

Anyway, I will be watching closely the fate of nocturne in this episode because just several days ago, nocturne made history by being the first to have 7 posts (at least when I made the screen capture below) in the Top 10.

And that truly amuses me is because 2 days before that happened, I had a discussion with another blogger about the ‘dk-effect’ (i.e. that posts from dk will always be ponged into the Top 10), and that Uzyn (whom we assumed to be this extraordinary evil genius) has made use of this opportunity to remove dk from ping.sg so some sanity will return to the Top 10.

Apparently, we didn’t consider that other bloggers will move to fill that position and the ‘dk-effect’ will always be permanent feature in ping.sg until the Top 10 is completely removed. We are simply too naive and we have definitely over-estimated in some parts when we had our discussion.