Culburn

[Mori Chu]

You may have noticed that Culburn369 (aka "Cubby", "Culburn Castleberry", "Giuseppe", "Thread", and others) currently inhabits and posts on this board. He was banned from the old phxsuns.net for flooding the board with mean-spirited posts and threads, including personal attacks, racist comments, profanity/vulgarity, and just general rudeness. He's probably the main reason phxsuns.net was created in the first place, to have a site that could be better moderated and free of such trolling and flaming.

When creating this new site, I had to ask myself, should I have an open registration system and let folks like Cubby come in? Or should I try to ban him or restrict him to read-only mode? My take on it is, a lot of the things people are upset about happened over a decade ago. People sometimes do change over time, or at least learn to moderate themselves a bit. I would rather give people the benefit of the doubt than just assume the worst and ban them from participating in the community.

Cubby has already made a few trollish posts. He posted a thread teasing us for losing to LA (the Clippers, not the Lakers; but still). He had a few individual posts that were mocking some of the Suns recent personnel decisions. So you may say, he's back to his old tricks again. I look at that and I say, none of it has much potency. Some of it is salty or teasey, but Cubby's old antics were much worse and more inflammatory.

The guy is capable of making normal posts when he wants to. He's talked about TV shows in the General area, and he actually talks about basketball when the mood strikes him. So I don't think his net contribution to the conversation is zero/negative. I for one am not really that bothered even when he does make a semi-troll post, because any post is just a bunch of words and you can choose how to react to those words. If he taunts the Suns, oh well, it doesn't change their record or the fact that we are probably the most pleasant surprise in the league this year. Cubby's a Laker fan; his team is truck stop fecal matter. There's nothing he can really say or do that can make the Suns even close to as bad as his pathetic Lakers.

We tend to be a little thin-skinned as a group. It's okay if somebody gives us an occasional ribbing when we goof up or lose a game, I think. As long as they don't flame us or flood the board about it or make a bunch of personal attacks, I can take it. When the Lakers lose, I'll be the first in line to make fun of Cubby. Tit for tat.


I think my overall preferred way of handling Cubby, or others like him, would be:

- Let him know that extreme trolling won't be tolerated and will lead to a ban or read-only block (done).

- Encourage anybody who is offended or bothered by anybody else's posts to put that person on their "Ignore" list.

- If anybody's behavior starts to cross the line, follow through on it and reduce their permissions and/or ban them.

How do you guys feel about this? I want to have a friendly community like we had on the old phxsuns.net, but to really ban every Cubby out there would mean a closed registration system, which makes it hard to grow the user base. I don't want anybody to leave or stop posting because of anybody else, and I really want everybody here to feel comfortable and at ease.

If you have any thoughts about this, please feel free to post in this thread. Or if you'd rather not post publicly, send me a private message. A few of you have already done that, which is what lead to this post you're reading here.

[Mori Chu]

(And Cubby, I know you'll probably be the first to read/view this thread. I bet you've got a lil cubby chubby seeing your name in lights, a whole thread and dissertation devoted to ya. Your 15 minutes o' dash-dot-net fame. Soak it up!)

[In2ition]

I could care less if he's on here. A lot of his posts and ribbings are actually honest takes on the way the Suns did/do business. Even though it's entirely fun for him to instigate Suns fans and he might try to do it in the most annoying way possible to get under the skin, some of the stuff is true and things that the Suns need to look themselves in the mirror and fix.

When you want to be a champion in the business of sports, sometimes you need to be an a-hole and make decisions that are best for the franchise and not necessarily pander to the casual fan.

[Superbone]

He burned his bridges long ago. If I was in charge, it would have been an instant ban. He's the lowest of the low of racist scum.

He has already been added to my "enemies" list so I don't see his posts. The thread he started last night is trolling and shouldn't be tolerated. At the very least, he shouldn't have the ability to start a new thread.

I don't appreciate his presence and I hope it doesn't drive me away. I refuse to associate with his type in real life or on a message board. Even in his recent incarnation, only about one in every 10 posts has decent basketball content.

[TOO]

He burned his bridges long ago. If I was in charge, it would have been an instant ban. He's the lowest of the low of racist scum.

He has already been added to my "enemies" list so I don't see his posts. The thread he started last night is trolling and shouldn't be tolerated. At the very least, he shouldn't have the ability to start a new thread.

I don't appreciate his presence and I hope it doesn't drive me away. I refuse to associate with his type in real life or on a message board. Even in his recent incarnation, only about one in every 10 posts has decent basketball content.

This.

I have zero tolerance for trolls, even less for moronic bigots.

[In2ition]

Racist and Bigoted... Yeah, that's a ban.

[iLLmatic]

He burned his bridges long ago. If I was in charge, it would have been an instant ban. He's the lowest of the low of racist scum.

He has already been added to my "enemies" list so I don't see his posts. The thread he started last night is trolling and shouldn't be tolerated. At the very least, he shouldn't have the ability to start a new thread.

I don't appreciate his presence and I hope it doesn't drive me away. I refuse to associate with his type in real life or on a message board. Even in his recent incarnation, only about one in every 10 posts has decent basketball content.

This is my fear Mori, right here. I'm afraid that Cubby's presence is going to scare a lot of the original posters away like SB, INF, Shel, and Swing. These posters are what made .NET for me, I've always enjoyed coming to .NET for their basketball take. So far Cubby hasn't cranked his trolling to Spurs Talk level yet, but I think it's only a matter of time.

[Superbone]

If people want that, Spurs Talk is readily available.

[carey]

If we're having a mod vote I side with 'Bone. Obviously it's your place & your decision, but I just think the kind of attitude he has is like a spoiled apple ruining the bunch.

I don't mind straight basketball talk. I'd actually like to see a few more different opinions that aren't based in Suns love around here. However, they don't need to end with haha, you suck, still no championship. Haha, you'll regret drafting Len. Haha, you should have traded for Pau. Over and over ad nauseam. It's already old.

[m1chal]

Different opinions are cool and all but dude is annoying as hell.

[carrrnuttt]

He's posting to get attention and to elicit reactions from people he obviously couldn't care less about.

How is someone with that mindset going to be anything BUT a detriment to an otherwise good forum for discussion?

I mean, literally YEARS of being banned and/or restricted hasn't mellowed him in any way, so how do you think he'll be when he's actually receiving the attention he's clamoring for like a deranged crackhead?

I mean yeah, most of us can actually just agree to ignore him, but I can only imagine it will make him escalate like the petulant child that he is, and frankly, even if you have him on ignore, he can still clutter up a thread.

I'm all for booting his ass out or at least restricting him.

[Mori Chu]

If you set him on your Ignore list, does that essentially keep him out of sight and out of mind? If he makes a thread, cam you see that thread in the list even if you have him on Ignore? Would removing his thread creation privileges but leaving him with posting privileges be a reasonable balance where particular people could avoid him if they wanted to, without having to outright ban him?

One might ask why he is worth the trouble, why I am sticking up for the guy. It is not about him so much as the general principles or code of conduct of the site. I'd prefer to treat everybody the same as much as possible and apply the same response to anybody who is out of line.

[Superbone]

If you set him on your Ignore list, does that essentially keep him out of sight and out of mind? If he makes a thread, cam you see that thread in the list even if you have him on Ignore? Would removing his thread creation privileges but leaving him with posting privileges be a reasonable balance where particular people could avoid him if they wanted to, without having to outright ban him?

Unfortunately, no. You still see his threads and you still see others' quotes from him.

[Shabazz]

I don't have the history with him that 'Bone does, but if you've pissed off someone like Bone to that extent, there must be something wrong with you.

Personally, I'm fine putting him on ignore. The spamming bothers me more than the trolling. If someone threw out an occasional "Suns Suck," whatever. But 50 posts where you say the exact same thing over and over and over again and you have to ask what the benefit is to having this person as a member.

At least show some creativity in your posts.

[carrrnuttt]

If you set him on your Ignore list, does that essentially keep him out of sight and out of mind? If he makes a thread, cam you see that thread in the list even if you have him on Ignore? Would removing his thread creation privileges but leaving him with posting privileges be a reasonable balance where particular people could avoid him if they wanted to, without having to outright ban him?

One might ask why he is worth the trouble, why I am sticking up for the guy. It is not about him so much as the general principles or code of conduct of the site. I'd prefer to treat everybody the same as much as possible and apply the same response to anybody who is out of line.

I'd like to point out that you yourself acknowledged that Cubby is likely getting satisfaction that this thread even exists. The only way to beat someone like him down is to completely put him out-of-mind and out-of-sight. Even on ignore, you can still see his presence as noted above, so he'd just spam at that point to make sure he at least puts in a visual statement, if not visceral.

FYI: Besides his history on Sose's site, I regularly saw his posts on Spurstalk as well, so his history of attention-getting and trolling is well "appreciated" by me. I never responded to him directly, but I always wonder what kind of person devotes this much of his time and energy into trolling a specific group of people, even on another group of people's site.

[Phoenix219]

He wouldn't be doing this 10 years later just to antagonize us, considering he has had no interaction with us in that amount of time, and he was for awhile assumed dead. He honestly considers it a fan based allegiance to the team ... he just hopes for the opposite outcome. I won't pretend to understand that part. Once I told him I think he is a Suns fan from way back that got his heart broken too many times, and this is how he'll cope until they win a ring.

The no thread creation might be the balance needed, where people are welcome to use the ignore button.

I think we should respect Mori's decision to have open registration. We haven't had a board in so long, I'd say that beggars can't be choosers. I would hate to see people leave the community over this, but at the same time, thats a personal decision, and I would hope that weighing the pros and cons would never lead someone to leaving voluntarily. (Also, we have had people choose to leave over an assortment of people besides Culburn over the years... its not like the place has been a paradise since his removal. Between the politics threads, and some of the tempers during the mid Nash era....)

[LazarusLong]

Tigers don't change stripes, only the jungles they roam in.

[Mori Chu]

Laz! Dusty! Great to see you, old friend.

[LazarusLong]

Thanks for putting the board back together, homes. You rock...

[INFORMER]

I don't have the history with him that 'Bone does, but if you've pissed off someone like Bone to that extent, there must be something wrong with you.

Is there a more positive, optimistic, and generally accepting poster than 'bone? It really gets on my nerves sometimes.