In a Spin

An associate of mine was doing me a favour by posting some stories from The Sleaze on the social news site, Propeller. They were mainly old stuff from the archives, but it generated a fair bit of traffic. Interestingly, the readers there showed some good taste - whilst the stories which got the biggest number of hits were the smutty sounding titles, the ones which were most highly rated tended to be the most satirical. To cut a long story short, imagine my friend's surprise when they tried to log into their Propeller account on Saturday, only to find that it had been removed because they had allegedly 'violated the terms of service'! No further explanation was given and every story they had ever posted has also been removed from the site! No warning was given, no request was made to remove any specific story they had posted. Even worse, in an act of incredible pettiness, they've also locked my associate out of their My.Netscape pages. I really do find this quite extraordinary behaviour on Propeller's part. If something they had posted broke the rules, just remove that and send them a warning. Sure, if people persist in violating the rules ban them altogether, but to do this over an alleged first offence - what a bunch of twats!

Neither of us can figure out what this 'violation' was. The last story posted on Propeller was Scared Stiff, hardly grounds for a banning (although the story description did include the phrase 'whacks off in the face of fear' - perhaps that offended their delicate sensibilities). Maybe they just don't like grown-up humour which dares to satirise every aspect of life I can think of. In which case - grow up. I wouldn't mind, but there's so much really offensive shit posted there which goes unchallenged by their 'Anchors' (stick a 'W' in front of that word and you'll have a pretty good idea of what I think of them). At the end of the day, I suppose we shouldn't really expect anything better from the once-mighty AOL empire. The aspect of this business which most disturbs me is the attempt to remove all trace of my friend from Propeller. This is like the bad old days of the Soviet Union, for God's sake! However, they're so bloody inefficient over there that my friend has set up a new account under a different identity and recreated their MyNetscape page. I've got an ID there too, so they'd better watch out. Maybe we'll be posting some more stuff from The Sleaze. Then again, perhaps we'll just boycott the bloody place. It's no more than they deserve.