So I’m on the Penny Arcade forums ONLY for a very specific subforum involved with running community activities that has nothing to do with Penny Arcade proper.

So I try to get in today and it says I don’t have permission. All the subforums are gone. Did I get banned? What the heck did I do? Given how universally shitty mods are, I wouldn’t have been surprised if I was banned without notice for no reason.

The actual reason? Christmas shutdown. Every subforum has been disabled for a week, with only a “Christmas hangout” forum available.

fucking mod wrote:

It’s been a tradition for years now to shut down everything on Christmas and let everyone get together and share some holiday cheer with one another. Traditionally it only happens on Christmas but, since we skipped two years due to moving to Vanilla, we decided to make up for it and bring back the Hangout in a big way.

Huh? What? You have to limit the forums to a single one in order for Holiday cheer to be spread? What the fuck?

Naturally the sycophants start lining up (with meme quotes no less) and the “agree” and “awesome” votes pile up.

mouth overrun with cock wrote:

I, for one, welcome our Christmas forum overlords.

Yay! The Xmas hangout is back! I’ve missed it.

Someone replies they’re not terribly pleased with all the community activity being locked out for a week for the gayest reason ever.

worthless shitfuck mod wrote:

People you interact with have not gone anywhere. Everyone can post in the Hangout.

The threads you were posting in will return in a few days. If you cannot wait that long, then maybe a moment to reflect on a few things is in order.

Nothing has been inconvenienced, just the entire Penny Arcade community, 99.9% of which are useless morons, has been condensed into a single forum with all your old threads gone! Because holiday cheer!

One guy speaks up that the whole thing is pretty dumb. A bright red INFRACTED notice is now on his post.

another shitlord admin wrote:

Oh shit sorry, I forgot that we owe you something

All you have to do IS NOT FUCK UP THE FORUM! Your one fucking job is to not destroy the forum, and you couldn’t even do that. This is beyond Barbarito worthless.

Another person simply asks “why?”

tinpot Dwight Schrute wrote:

A. It gives the moderators a couple of days off to spend with their families

B. It gives everyone a chance to interact with each other where they otherwise wouldn’t

C. It’s enjoyed by the vast majority of people

D. It gives me a chance to populate my list of shitty whiners

A. The mods could take a vacation by just not looking at the goddamn forums for a week. The idea that the whole operation would come crashing down if they weren’t around for a few days reeks of desperate self-imposed importance. This is besides the fact that the solution for keeping the forums from collapsing without them was to preemptively collapse the forums themselves.

B. God fucking knows everyone wanted to be lumped in with fan fiction and anime discussions. The only interaction taking place in the Christmas forum is suck ups blowing the mods for this brilliant iron boot.

C. He’s actually claiming this right below the INFRACTED post of the one guy who rightfully spoke up on how retarded this is. They also skipped doing this for two years, and not a single person demanded they bring it back.

D. FUCK MODS. Your only goddamn job should be to invisibly fix crashes, bugs, and bot spam, you worthless Ben Schumin greasy folded FUCK.

He made his own quirky “FAQ” about getting a username changed.

Can I Get My Name Changed?

No! Not under any circumstances!

Aww, but why?

Because if I allow people to PM me for name changes, it is literally the only thing I have time to do.You should have chosen the name you wanted at registration. Think hard about it, because once you have the name it is not getting changed. I don’t care if your name is Mr Clown and your parents get killed by a clown and every time you see your name you sick up in your mouth and start crying and you inhale the sick through your sobs and choke and spew blood up onto your monitor. You should have thought of that eventuality before you registered.

Oh well, I guess I’ll just make a new account with the name I want…

Right, you can do that. But if you do, and we find out, both your accounts will be banned.

Aww man…

Yeah I know, but we’re not clogging the servers with accounts just because you wanted to take the umlaut out of your name

CLOGGING THE SERVERS!

I want Tube to tell us when the last time he ran a vacuum analyze on the “servers.” I would also like this dumb fuck to explain to us how the servers can get “clogged.” Is someone flushing the cache with wet wipes?

What about the name change thread?

Oh yes. That. Periodically I will make a thread where people can petition for name changes. If you want a name change, I flip a coin. If it lands heads, you get your name change. If it lands tails, I choose you a new name. This name can be anything. It can be funny. It can be a pun. It can be monumentally insulting. If you don’t like it you cannot have it changed back. The thread is not a joke! Don’t be like the guy who got a name implying that he whines excessively who then whined excessively about it and was apparently completely unaware of the irony of this situation. Complaining will not get your name changed back, and implying that the coin toss is rigged will annoy me massively because I take vague pride in the fact that I don’t cheat on it. Unlike your mother.

So wacky! So quirky! So random! He might choose anything for your name! Boy, he is so edgy! He should signify your crazy new username with an air horn!

worthless shitfuck mod wrote:

People you interact with have not gone anywhere. Everyone can post in the Hangout.

The threads you were posting in will return in a few days. If you cannot wait that long, then maybe a moment to reflect on a few things is in order.

Yeah asshole, you don’t want to spend your Christmas in some jumbled mess of a mega-forum to let our autistic mods sit down with their TV dinners? LOOOOOOOOOSSSSSSSSEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEER.

It’s such a ridiculous idea on every level but the idea that this pissant could comment on when other people need to engage in self reflection, all the while shutting down a message board to get “family time”, really takes the cake. I love the implication that these guys won’t be up before the crack of dawn on Christmas Day handing out infractions to anyone that objects to the temporary ruining of the forum. As if spending your Christmas on an internet forum isn’t enough of a reason for reflection. As if this entire thing isn’t just to create the illusion that those moderators put in less time to the forums and are smarter than everyone on it, when certainly the reverse is true. This sentiment is so common nowadays it makes me sick. “I might moderate a forum but I’m not a loser like those posters(who are smarter/funnier than me and spend less time on the forum”, “I might play MMOs but I’m not a loser like those assholes who play all day and have all the best gear(even though I do play all day yet find myself unable to succeed in even this virtual world)”, “I might play this F2P game but I’m not a loser like those people who spend money on it (Even though my insistence on not spending a cent probably costs me more in the long run)”. It’s the new fucking paradigm of “nerd culture”, everyone is afraid of being a loser. Well I think it’s about time everyone face the fucking music, we’re all losers.

I really don’t think there’s anything wrong with it, in fact all the issues come from the denial of this fact. People somehow want to reconcile sitting on forums during Christmas with being a “winner”, and we end up seeing these stupid acrobatics as a result. This same kind of idea is running games and MMOs as well, it’s just a complete fucking shame.

Comments? Join us on the forum.