Blaine, the ignore feature might work if the guy made a normal amount of posts, but he deliberately hijacks every thread by relentlessly injecting his off-topic and inappropriate remarks over and over again. EVERY thread he gets on gets derailed within a few comments, and all subsequent attempts to bring the conversation back around get met with an accelerated posting rate from the guy until there is no hope of ever getting back on topic.
Take this very thread, which he started to derail on the very first page:
Then this:
And another irrelevant post to make the same point he has made constantly on other threads he has destroyed:
Up to this point, I just let it ride, attempting to find common ground between us with a response about his grandkids. At that point he stepped on the gas with the "objectivity" thing:
At which point I told him to stop hijacking my thread because his posts were not at all in keeping with the spirit of the thread that I had started, to which he replied:
By this time, one CTE user had already been banned, and this dude was off to the races.
So, I would like to know how putting this guy on my personal ignore list could to anything to prevent the ruination of the thread I took the time to start. I don't care about the "legality" of his postings according to the strict interpretation of the rules of the forum, it's just flat out rude and destructive. He got banned for a year for doing the same thing when his arguments about the pendulum stroke vs. the piston stroke took over every thread he took part in. Same back then, people put him on ignore, but he figured out how to ruin the threads anyway.
I don't have an answer for any of this. Apparently, the owners of the site have decided to let him have his way. I have no control over that situation. It wasn't too long ago that he was threatened with a permanent ban if he posted in ANY aiming thread. Shortly after that he came on here and made an announcement that he had "spoken" to Mr. Wilson (the head mod) and it was cool for him to start posting here again. I have no idea what might have taken place during that conversation, but it's kinda scary thinking he has that much power over the mods and owners that he is allowed to run amok on thread after thread without so much as a warning.
Maybe he's the Pope?
What are we to do? Well, I guess we have to quit this place and have our pool community on Facebook, but it's not the same at all, not even close. If I want to discuss pool and get answers to questions I have, there is really no other place to visit but this site. Folks like Rick are destroying this resource for everybody, and I think it's worth any attempt to either get him reigned in (usually the mere threat of a ban is enough for most people to get the message) or removed. I'm not a fan of banning, but sometimes you gotta cut out a tumor to prevent it from becoming malignant.
