That's a fairly accurate account (though naturally I dispute that I "went way too far" - if you actually read the vast majority of my posts at the time, they were angry, but rationally angry. Kinsey on the other hand called me, among other things, a "sodomising fucking rapist" without any censure).

However, unless we're thinking of very different things, PacDude is misrepresenting the vote which happened shortly before my last banning. There were only two choices in the poll, and while they were about half a page long, the options boiled down to:

1. Free mods* should be made completely illegal under all circumstances.
2. It should be completely illegal to make a free mod under any circumstances.

(*) ie without signed permission in triplicate from the person who first stole them from Williams/Bally/etc

It's now, slowly, becoming clear to everyone else what I realised about nine months ago. VP Forums is nothing but a mutual masturbation forum for the tiny clique of moderators - who, it should be noted, have produced about three table releases between them in those nine months.

I got booted for being "destructive", despite having produced rather more for the community than all the moderators put together.

(Incomplete list:)
http://ds.dial.pipex.com/thumbs_aloft/wos/history.htm

I broke none of the rules agreed with AJ, nor even any of the rules imposed after the "vote" - in which, incidentally, most people who disagreed with the moderators were banned from participating, and in which less than 1% of the VPForums membership took part. AJ has refused for months to answer any emails requesting the reason for the ban. The one referred to by PacDude is simply completely untrue - I haven't visited the VP chatroom in over a year, far less said what I'm supposed to have said there. A simple glance at a log would prove that.

PacDude, who hasn't even flamed anyone or released unauthorised mods, gets banned for simply disagreeing with the moderators.

Countless other authors and forum contributors have left, sick of the hideous atmosphere caused by the stupendously incompetent "moderation". (After all, a good moderator, like a good referee, is invisible.) There are practically no active authors left now on VPForums apart from Kristian (who has disagreed with the moderators on occasion, and will hence now be on their McCarthy-style hitlist now they've got rid of PacDude), Scapino and Destruk, none of whom are exactly prolific.

Discounting PacDude and Kristian's great updates of existing tables, there's hardly been a significant VPM release in months - Checkpoint is the last one I can think of. Almost anyone who might be able to take old tables and improve them - as happened on a daily basis before the current forum regime hijacked the community - has been either kicked out or driven away. The mods are keen on trumpeting how many people are signing up, but something like 0.6% of these people make so much as the occasional post, far less offer any practical contribution. Most of them, as you can see from the forums' own stats, don't even bother to READ any thread that isn't a table release, far less contribute to one. Thousands of leeches are not a sign of a healthy community.

The moderators and admins of VPForums have DESTROYED the VP community. Of that there can be no argument. They haven't destroyed VP itself, though dark clouds appear to be gathering in that area too. But you only have to compare the lively, vibrant, release-filled forums of 18 months ago (where - hey, guess what? - everyone was simply trying to make the best recreations of pinball tables possible, rather than set themselves up as rule-wielding bureaucrats "controlling" something that had no need to be controlled and was doing just fine on its own) to the pathetic, empty, concrete Stalinist folly there now to see that it's true.

It's sad to watch the tiny handful of people left there running around ever more frantically and shouting ever more loudly among their ever-decreasing numbers in an attempt to pretend that all is well. Though it's at least nice to see that with the latest "debate" threads they've now abandoned all pretence that the rules are anything other than "Do exactly what we say all the time or we'll ban you." At least that's one form of hypocrisy they've given up trying to maintain.

I long since gave up caring what a bunch of dicks like them thought of me. I long since gave up going to a lot of trouble to provide a load of silent leeches with great VP table mods on my own webspace. I don't do many any more, but when I do I just keep them to myself and enjoy playing them.

There are almost no great VPM tables left undone that I'd like to see. It's hilarious to watch VPForums admins turning up here desperately trying to start fights under the mistaken impression that they can hurt or trouble me in any way. I've got all the VP tables, and all the self-respect, I'll ever need. It'll be nice if this forum turns into a viable alternative, but if it doesn't I won't really care. As it stands, the useless, hypocritical, arrogant, egotistical, and above all totally destructive "moderation" of VPForums has sucked all the fun and life out of the Visual Pinball community (though not out of Visual Pinball itself), and I have no interest in being in that community any more.

The same thing happened to the fruit-machine emulator forums based around the great MPU34 emulator a while back. The admins there had followed the VPF model, and watched as the pent-up repression inevitably exploded in a horrendous mess that saw SEVEN new alternative and competing forums set up in less than a week. Eventually they came to their senses and reopened the original Fruit Forums, but without all the censorship and banning. Everyone came back, everyone got back to talking about fruit machines, and when the odd argument arose, it blew itself over because people were allowed to argue freely about it, and everyone stayed friends (albeit friends who disagreed with each other sometimes) and the flow of releases continues to this day in a relaxed and friendly environment almost entirely free of bullshit politics. Sadly, I think the VPF staff are far too enamoured of their "power" to ever go back along the path of sanity. Hey ho.

(Blimey, this was going to be a two-line correction about PacDude's account of the poll. Guess I just wanted to post a proper obituary for the good old days when we just got together and made nice pinball tables.)