29 Oct 2009
HikiCulture Admin Strongly Suspected of Spamming
First off, my apologies for the image quality.
I’m very newbish at image editing and it was only this year that I discovered what “cropping” does.
Anyways, on to the topic.
The short version:
Someone has recently been spamming the HikiPhpBB forum. (1st screenshot)
There’s strong evidence that it is the admin of another Hikikomori forum, HikiCulture.
Evidence #1 is the conversation in the 2nd screenshot.
If the text is blurry, here’s the conversation:
Chair:
Me and thirteen other people are talking about you in my IRC channel right now Foolness.Do you think we are saying positive, or negative things? You have a day to answer. If you don’t answer, I’ll beat you up.
(spamming occurs)
Later on…
“…”:
Cut this bullshit out now. You two have a problem, keep it off this board.
Google: (2nd spam account)
Wut R U gonna do about it tuff guy?
Evidence #2 is where this “Google” account pmed me:
Hi.
I’m Mr. Google, how R U?
The long version:
This all started with this blog post: Is HikiCulture turning more and more into a spam forum?
Then 2 HikiCulture admin (1 new, 1 the founder and user “Chair”) brought up some unrelated accusations of my time in the HikiCulture forum which prompted me to address the issue in a separate blog post:
Reply to Chair/HikiCulture admin
Around this time, the events prompted me to make two topics. One in the AnonIB /hikikomori/ board which is now deleted per the request of a user and another here.
If you visit the two above links, you’ll see how the events got cleared up under the comments.
After my name was cleared up and it turned out the accusation was mistakenly directed at me by a new admin, I focused on other blog posts I was working on and became inactive from the HikiPhpBB forum.
In particular I was kept busy by my recent blog post because of all the problems I have with getting it to post correctly.
Only after, did I return to the forum and address Chair’s recent reply to me. (I didn’t actually leave the forum though since that blog post was in reply to a topic made in that forum.)
That was when all these happened.
For a copy of my reply and Chair’s original post, just look at the last comment underneath the “Reply to Chair/HikiCulture admin” topic.
If the formatting is hard to read though, here’s my reply: (Note that Chair’s reply is chopped up into quotes)
Chair:
Sorry for being somewhat rude in my reply Foolness, I just don’t enjoy people making wild assumptions about me. In the future, if you want to know what my intentions are in anything I do, please email me at {{{e-mail removed}}}
Me:
Problem is, if you understood the context of the blog, I’m not even sure it was you who was editing the wikipedia article so why would I contact you?
If it was you however, then similarly, why should you be trusted to not censor the conversation when you have already strongly removed someone else’s post from a site you don’t own?
Contacting you privately was just not an option and the actions of both you and your fellow admin under the comment section further made it hard to follow that approach.
Chair:
I’ll likely respond to your email within a day or two of receiving it. I ask you of one thing though - if I’m to send you an email, please do not quote anything that I am to say in any of your blogs or elsewhere. If you do not comply with this request, I will not respond to any further inquiries. People quoting personal messages/email messages without first receiving consent from the person you’re quoting is, in my opinion, more unethical than a person ‘advertising’ their website on Wikipedia. This is only my opinion though of course.
Me:
It was a necessary evil I had to consider quickly.
When you and Quasar start bringing up an un-related issue in a blog topic, especially one that attacks my personal character, events can quickly become “he said/he said” and it could start a flame war.
In those circumstances it’s almost impossible to verify anything objectively because the admins are the ones throwing out the accusations and not just some members.
It can also be hard to rely on members on said community because you’re not sure how much they care about a flame war starting out.
In those cases, there are a few things that can be done to quickly quell the smoke. One of them is for one side to give out all the information they knew from their perspective.
Chair:
For the record - I truly feel that adding the HikiCulture link on Wikipedia is not unethical at all considering that:
Me:
It’s not about ethics. It’s about their rules for notability. Especially when a discussion page comment has been removed around the same time.
Chair:
My forum’s subject matter is very much relevant to the Wikipedia article the link is being posted on (If I were to stick a link to my site on the Viagra Wikipedia article for example, then yes, I’d agree with you on the whole ‘spam forum’ thing. There is high relevancy though).
Me:
No, in general, forums and blogs are not notable enough for Wikipedia no matter how related they are to the topic.
Even when this forum was on there, it was highly suspect.
It could’ve been easily attributed to the lack of English links.
When this forum was removed for some reason and not returned, it cemented the fact that the Wikipedians monitoring the article have decided that the article had improved enough that the forum link could be dropped.
Unless the link to this forum was re-added and gained consensus for notability, any other forum link replacing it is equally non-notable.
Even then, the issue between re-adding a forum link and deleting a post in the discussion board is far from the same intentions.
End
It was then that Chair posted that threatening reply above.
At that point, I didn’t understand what he meant by “beat up” and I ignored the post thinking it was just a normal flame.
Before I left though, I did saw the SPAM account post some spam but I never associated the two. (At the time, it was just 1 or 2 posts)
Then a couple of people pmed me (not much, I’m not an important person in any of the Hikikomori boards) and alerted me to the issue.
At first, I was even being overtly cautious and didn’t link the two events together but it turns out this might not be the first time Chair has spammed.
There was talk of a spam attack in /hikikomori/ linked to Chair which resulted in a backlash against HikiCulture in that board. (An event I never saw but was talked about in pm)
Coupled with the other evidences above and there’s strong evidence that Chair is the spammer based on all this.
Please note that after the “Wikipedia” issue got clarified, I’ve never seen Chair spam the HikiCulture boards elsewhere so I’m not removing the HikiCulture link in this post just yet.
I will however put a warning that Chair is strongly suspected of being a spammer.
I will also try to post this link in several social media sites so for those who are reading this that are not Hikikomori or do not care for the English-speaking Hikikomori community, my apologies for blogspamming in your favorite sites. I just felt this issue was serious enough to “report” as to keep future Hikikomoris from (possibly) being associated with a spammer.
