ChristianForums: Gnosticism in action (2006/11/10)
ChristianForums is essentially gnostic.
[read more...]ChristianForums: Helping people break the rules (2006/11/10)
So, sometimes, staff don’t really want to take a personal hand in things, but they want to break the rules. One user at CF, who posted under the name “Sharp” (he’s currently banned, it appears), used to get a lot of complaints about his posts being flames. He called people names, and asserted that they were not true Christians when they didn’t agree with him.
[read more...]ChristianForums: ShannonKish gets banned, and unbanned (2006/11/09)
CF’s elaborate and complicated warning system was, in late 2004, rather a mess. The idea was that, if possible, staff should merely talk to you about things. If you kept pushing it, you would get an unofficial warning; unless you had received an unofficial warning (or, possibly, an unofficial warning for violating that same rule), you were not supposed to get an official warning. Only official warnings led to bans.
[read more...]ChristianForums: Offending the little ones (2006/11/09)
One of the quirks of CF is that it has always been dominated by people who feel the need to draw firm lines and boundaries to exclude the people who aren’t quite right. It’s generally phrased in terms of protecting people from bad doctrine.
[read more...]ChristianForums: Stray bullet, round 1 (2006/11/09)
Okay, so, in a previous episode, I mentioned how Stray Bullet got suspended from CF for claiming to be Christian.
[read more...]ChristianForums: The fortress mentality (2006/11/09)
A major shift in CF occurred in 2003-2004. Staff began to adopt a fortress mentality, in which they viewed themselves as being under constant attack from all sorts of sources. One of the funniest examples of this was masks.
[read more...]ChristianForums: Technical enforcement rears its ugly head (2006/11/09)
So, the time has come to examine what I think is probably the real beginning of the end in many ways. Technical enforcement.
[read more...]ChristianForums case studdy: Gunny, trolling, and funding. (2006/11/09)
Okay, time for another case study. Gunny. Gunny went by various names; Gunny, gunnysgt, GySgt, and others. (He changed his name away from GySgt after someone thought it meant Gay Sargeant.)
[read more...]ChristianForums case study: Annabel Lee (2006/11/09)
I’m going to use an example here, but I have to give you a caveat first: One of the CF staff, some time after this, came out and gave a real apology for it. In a very real sense, this offense has been addressed.
[read more...]ChristianForums, 2002-2003 (2006/11/09)
It’s funny to imagine that this was the good old days. (And given how far back it is, and that no one realized back then how crucial it was to save everything in case it got deleted, I may have some subtle errors. Feel free to submit corrections, ideally with documentation. Alleged corrections submitted without supporting evidence will be remarked on, but not necessarily accepted as truth.) Throughout this article, there’s some references to “Erwin” – that’s Erwin Loh, founder of “Loh Enterprises”, which is the company that actually owns CF legally. Erwin is an Australian member of a Willow Creek church. His management of CF is often influenced by his lack of involvement with a lot of American politics.
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