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A forum for the hard core Minnesota Vikings fan. Discuss upcoming games, opponents, trades, draft or what ever is on the minds of Viking fans!

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glg
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Posts: 10851
Joined: Sun Jul 27, 2003 9:44 pm
Location: Chicago, IL

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Post by glg »

Cliff has completely taken over all aspect of running the board. I no longer hold any "keys".

I made the decision to shut the board down in anger. It was rash and it wasn't fair to the users of the board or especially to Cliff. I completely pulled the rug out from under him after handing him the board just last month. My statement was aimed at a particular subset of users of the board, I didn't intend for it to be seen as widely as it was. I should have known better that it would "get out".

On the upside, I'm a software developer and making backups is reflexive (I had a college prof once say "there are two types of people in the world, those who backup and those who will", I moved from the latter to the former a LONG time ago). I sent the backup over to Cliff and he's restored it.

The rest of this post is an attempt to explain what happened. If you're not interested, that's fine, just stop reading here.

As most of you are aware, I've pretty much ceased following football for various reasons (it seems like the recent events with Rice, Hardy, Peterson etc is just piling on). But that hardly means I've stopped following sports. I rarely miss PTI, but usually watch it later. I didn't catch Friday's episode until Saturday morning. The Peterson story had just broken when they aired on Friday, so they knew almost nothing. I read some more online and was quickly disgusted by what I found. I decided I wanted to see how those on the board were handling the news. The thread is still interesting to read now. From the start when there was almost nothing through the release of the pictures to the confusion over the child's age, but it reaches a point where it's clear what happened and that the child was 4. At that point, the horror began.

I understand feeling conflicted about the situation. I understand condemning an incident and giving Peterson another shot if it's a one-time thing (which appears to not be the case). I do not understand making excuses for Peterson or worse, openly advocating for child abuse. For those that didn't see the posts, there were quite a number of users doing that. I posted to the mods (for the conspiracy theorists, yes, there is a mods-only forum where we talk about you) my horror. I nearly shut the board down on Saturday morning. Instead, I deleted a total of 13 users who I felt made posts that stepped beyond human decency in advocating for the beating of a 4 year old (including one idiot who believes that because the Texas law Peterson was charged under doesn't say "child abuse" that this somehow wasn't a case of "child abuse" as if the exact name of the legal charge changes what this is in common language). As the weekend moved on, I monitored the thread and deleted some more. Things quieted down.

Then, Monday. The Vikings made their foolish decision to reactivate Peterson. I came home from work to find another bunch (10 or so) of users in the reinstated thread basically saying "see, the Vikings agree this isn't so bad!". I deleted those, but then I snapped. You've all seen the results of that. A couple hours later, I saw that I had a couple emails about the message that were pretty clearly not from board members. I realized that it was making the rounds on twitter, so I took the message down. I think it was up for something like 4 hours. Being the internet, that was plenty of time.

Yesterday, seeing all the articles about it, seeing that CBS tracked down Jim, seeing some of you post about it on purplepride, I felt bad. My rash decision had brought down a community that was much larger than me. Last night, I checked the backups, they looked sound. I reached out to Cliff this morning and got the backups to him. He's done an amazing job getting them hosted so quickly.

To the #### who think child abuse is okay, my message stands. Go #### yourselves.

To everyone else (and you vastly outnumber the ####), thank you for everything. I'm sorry I let the #### get to me. It wasn't fair to any of you. Please give Cliff and the mods your support, I imagine things will remain rocky for a while.
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