So, I have finally gotten myself banned on ping.sg. All this for trying to ping one post. As DK has said on Plurk – ‘who ask you itchy backside go back there?’, and he is right.
Still, I am quite sure this brings to mind the following comment made sometime ago by the President of the Association of Bloggers:
They were easily manipulated and even banned for standing up against the foreign tyrant from self-proclaimed ‘community meta weblog for Singapore bloggers’.
Was my case an example and proof of this?
Unfortunately not, for those who were hoping for it. And this post is nothing more than a personal reflection on what I had done on Thursday (19-Feb-2009) that leads to the ban after I tried to ping just one post from nowhere.per.sg. When my attempts to get that pinged failed, I set up the rss feed using the mirror at Xanga.
That went well and so I plugged (i.e. advertised) the post on a private Plurk message to several friends who still have ping.sg accounts and seek their help to pong it.
Whatever happened next was pretty swift… by midnight, all my new new posts fed from Xanga had disappeared from my ping.sg profile, and then I could no longer ping any posts. On attempting to set up my blogs for pinging again the next morning, this is what I see:
Do I think I was unfairly banned, I wouldn’t say I am. I could at least console myself to the fact that as of 20-Feb-2009, I can still log on to that account, and the last post since July last year is still there. I hadn’t bothered to check again since then.
If my account still there, it is somewhat interesting as the people who were previously banned for speaking badly about ping.sg did not suffer the same fate, but had their accounts and all their posts removed. Am I tempting fate by pointing this out?
Either way, a friend pointed out that I was probably banned for reasons such as mirroring, and if that is the case then it is puzzling since I used to ping both blogs when I was active (see screen capture below:)
If it was because of cloning (i.e. the use of many accounts to falsify the popularity of a post) then perhaps the end user’s agreement has changed ever since the exodus of a number of former ping.sg users because I recalled it used to be the banning of the ghosts account while the pong count is reset to zero.
Whatever the disparity in treatment is, it no longer matters. An admin of any site can take whatever actions necessary as he deems fit as long as any violation of an end user’s agreement has occurred.
And looking back at everything that has transpired, I simply look at it as my karma catching up with me. After all, I could have stayed neutral during the disagreement then but I had chosen to make a video to declare what my stand is, and then went on to write a series of posts on that matter to voice my displeasure.
Of course that means making myself a pariah and I now got what I deserved. I have always believed that a man has to face the consequences of his own actions, and I definitely considered this a pretty mild response. Clearly, there is nothing more I can do to set right something which if I was in his shoes, considered as an act of betrayal.
Was it a lapse of judgement or pure stupidity that I even considered pinging that post? Perhaps it’s a bit of both and maybe some of these days I may even find it funny just like the rest of the people who hated me. I’ll laugh along with all of you when I could find a moment…
Cartoons:
Recommended Reads
Hear Ye! Hear Ye!: What does it mean to be a blogger?
