Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Walford Web: The Bully Pulpit

Walford Web forum is a riot. Seriously, it is. Pride of John Swallow, it boasts being the online home of Eastenders' discussion since 1997, and that much is true. What it doesn't boast about is its abusive bullyboy gang culture, blatant favouritism shown by the owner of the site to some regular posters breaking rules and the encouragement of "loving" everything about Eastenders and certain of its characters no matter how butt-clinchingly shitworthy the programme is at the moment.

Walford Web is patrolled by a gang of overgrown menchildren, who are basically spoiled brats, pouncing on  various posters with whom they disagree, even to the point of rudeness. There's Shamelessness (a rude child christened J***) who feels singularly unappreciated for all his efforts and who's inhabited the shadows of Walford Web since he was fourteen. He'll be 22 in October, so it's safe to say he grew up on the site. Shamelessness hates anyone intelligent enough to disagree with him or prove him wrong in any way, and when he's frustrated to the point that he's lost for words with which to reply, he'll resort to good, old-fashioned swearing.

I have the dubious honour of having been told by Shamelessness to shut the fuck up - in writing on the site. Now, John Swallow is at pains to prohibit swearing in an aggressive manner and even started a thread about it for discussion, which really wasn't a thread to discuss rudeness at all. It was a thread meant to bait me into replying or interjecting because so many of  John's little boy gang members had had their intelligence slighted when I had proven them wrong about certain things. When complaints were made to John about Shamelessness's blatant rudeness, which did break the rules, it was studiously ignored.

Yet I was banned.

This happened yet again and to another poster.When the poster PM'd John about Shamelessness flouting decorum and established forum civility, that personal message was ignored.

OK, I get it. John likes a peaceful life. Who doesn't? But if he's going to enforce one rule for one and not apply it to another, maybe it's time he shut the damned thing down. Of all people, John should understand intolerance and what it means to suffer it; yet he seems to turn a blind eye to this, especially when it concerns poor widdle Shamelessness, who's really nothing more than an overgrown spoiled brat and the victim of bad parenting.

Speaking of which, that brings us to Jark, fondly known as Jark the Jerk (real name J*** C***), a fey, winsome soul of twenty who knows everything about anything and dismisses anyone of divergent opinion as being "ridiculous." Jark has a Dixon of Dock Green fetish, in that he loves policing the forum, even though he's not a moderator. He also suffers from being twenty going on seventy-five, which would explain why he identifies so closely with the elderly spinsters behaving badly on all of the soaps he watches (and he watches them all). At times, his style, semantics and phraseology is that of an embittered, old woman - or rather, the ubiquitous old maid in britches.

The third part of the triumvirate is an eighteen year-old lad known as sweet *Betty*. *Betty*'s off to uni in the autumn, and he's in for a real eye-opener for his narrow-minded views and his distrust of anything committed to print. *Betty* is the moppet who's totally planned Kathy's return from the dead, awakening a zombie from a seven-year coma, after having been spirited away to Roswell, New Mexico in a witness protection programme. At least *Betty* does apologise for being rude, but when *Betty* does so, you'd best acknowledge and accept his apology within two minutes of its receipt, otherwise, he starts throwing his toys from the pram.

And speaking of prams, maybe instead of what's supposed to be a discussion forum aimed at an civil exchange of ideas amongst adults, John might be better off starting a creche or a kindergarten.

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