Friends,

As much as I hate to waste space and time with an issue like this, I feel it is necessary that the community know that this site, its members, mods and admins have been consistency and constantly harassed by a person, working in affiliation with a disgruntled group of individuals which now call themselves the RBOSE, named Codie Vickers.

His last banned acct concluded with:

"My name is Codie Vickers, and I have an unhealthy obsession with the Zeitgeist movement. I make sock puppet accounts over and over again because I have deluded myself into thinking that I am still a member of the Zeitgeist movement. The amount of time I spend doing this proves I have no life whatsoever. Maybe some day I will grow up and stop acting like a spoiled child. But probably not."
www.thezeitgeistmovement.com/joomla/inde...10&limitstart=20

Some of his credits include:
Perpetual accts created for the sake of creating problems in the community.
Impersonation of myself and various Admin and Mods.
Homophobic Hate Speech Rhetoric
Sexist Rhetoric
Threats of Violence
Baseless Threats of "Lawsuits"

and numerous other neurotic problems which constitute a mentally unstable and....well, extremely annoying person.

We have found out virtually everything about him. Where he lives, his prior legal past, his other internet sites he has been permanently banned from, etc.

I bring this up to all of you for we have decided to proceed with a restraining order against him to get him to stop coming here.
Now, I know some may say, "that isn't in the spirit of TZM." Yes, you are right- it is in the sad spirit of a distorted, hate-filled world where prior conditioning has gone afoul to a seemingly unrecoverable extent.

Frankly- this person needs serious psychological help.

Due to his behavior I have had Mods quit in fear and Admins refuse to come to public events for they fear his presence, so I am left with little recourse but to proceed with legal action for the sake of the community. He has even emailed and threatened me personally. We have pages and pages on him...

That being said, some of you might also be aware of the RBOSE group, which, again, is a group of people who likely mean well, but also continue to voice anti-TZM rhetoric, saying we "ban people" in an "abuse of power" and "are not transparent". This is particularly amusing when they now provide Mr. Vickers with an outlet to voice his hatred and persistence against us on their website and mumble server, knowing he engages in these false accts and hate speech on a near daily basis.

I want everyone to understand that the RBOSE is now a blacklisted organization for this reason. I have been informed that they are contacting Groups/Chapters now in a possible attempt to divide the movement, so everyone please be aware of this if you are contacted by them.

I am very sorry to have to express all of this for it is truly disheartening, but this is the current state of affairs in a world gone mad. I feel the need to be transparent about it in the event more problems occur.

Thanks for listening. As you might guess, I have better things I should be doing, but this issue has gone on long enough.

Peter

When I first joined I could understand why there were people setting up things like the RBOSE but I soon realised it only causes division and this is far too important for any division. Now I just feel disappointed in the RBOSE.

Here is a summary of the actions I have taken regarding Codie Vickers. I am focusing here on the specific, official actions I took, rather than the personal insults and threatening comments he has made, which are logged in the IRC here, at RBOSE, and elsewhere.

As far as I remember, Codie Vickers was first banned by me from the IRC on July 16, 2009, for making insulting and profane comments to Apollo, Nanos, and others. The logs are here:

www.thezeitgeistmovement.com/joomla/logs...vement.log.16Jul2009

starting at 22:16, and ending at

www.thezeitgeistmovement.com/joomla/logs...vement.log.17Jul2009

My first interaction with him, after receiving complaints about him, was:

[00:00] <tanktop> plautus, someone pointed out some things you said earlier, so I am warning you, please do not call people obscene names. getting angry is OK, but using slurs is not
[00:00] <plautus> tanktop, suck a dick, homo.

His forum name was "fertizizerspike", and was also banned.

At that time, he began repeatedly connecting to the IRC and the forum under various names and IP addresses. This is logged here:

www.thezeitgeistmovement.com/joomla/logs...vement.log.17Jul2009

In the following months, he created many accounts with varying names, sometimes variations of my nicknames, either in an effort to pose as me, or more often in combination with a homophobic slur. My involvement with him over the next few months was essentially to respond to complaints from other users and moderators, and to ban his additional accounts. During this time, I became aware that many of the user accounts causing problems were in fact created by him, and was able to correlate his user names of plautus and fertilizerspike with his real name, Codie Eugene Vickers, using publicly available information. We discussed this in mid-December in a private chat, which I am citing for reference (the names of others posting have been changed to protect their privacy). Here is an exerpt:

----

<tanktop>i have been doing some research and come to a conclusion, which others may have already reached
<tanktop>the person hominygrits is the same person as fertilizerspike

<a mod>he is tzm-plautus though
<tanktop>that means i have his name and location
<a mod>well he uses a vast range of IPs

<tanktop> www.blogger.com/profile/09732646785590012495

<tanktop>see plautus in the emails
<tanktop>now view this thread: www.thezeitgeistmovement.com/joomla/inde...10&limitstart=20
<tanktop>you'll see him arguing about paradigm and thunder, and saying " I compulsively correct errors"
<tanktop>then read: thezeitgeistmovement.com/joomla/index.ph...10&limitstart=10

<tanktop>if you google that phrase, you'll see that the only matches are people talking about zeitgeist and vent
<a mod>true

www.google.fi/search?hl=en&rlz=1C1GG...ch&aq=f&oq=/

<tanktop>in all of google, just fertilizer spike and hominygrits have used that phrase
<tanktop>it's all the same person, and their name is Codie Vickers
<tanktop>this can be determined from publicly available information, by google searching to match phrases they have posted, and the user names such as plautus, which is in the blog that bears his name

<tanktop>this should be enough information to clear up any confusion about who he is
<tanktop> en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Bcorr/Archives/Plautus

----

On December 26, 2009, he was again present in the IRC after being warned and banned many times, so I issued a cease and desist warning, calling him by name:

"[19:53] <tanktop> Codie Eugene Vikers, as an official agent of thezeitgeistmovement.com, I serve notice that you are ordered to cease and desist from trespassing on the web site, IRC server, Ventrilo server, and any other official property of the movement, and that failure to comply may result in civil and legal proceedings against you. All here present are witness to this notice."

After these warnings, he increased his activity, creating more accounts, and spamming the forum. I had to work with the global moderators to set up a system to enable them to delete his messages. We have logs of moderators deleting multiple, identical posts, multiple times. Almost daily, I have to either disable an account, or assist a moderator in IRC, the forum, or TS to ban him for continuing attacks.

I estimate that I have spent more than 100 hours personally dealing with damage he has caused.

This is a reminder that the movement is indeed at a very early stage, and this is optimal for now. At a later stage, with enough members having background in criminal psychology and non-violent communication - there could be teams aimed at successful communication with obsessive offenders.

peterjoseph wrote:
This is particularly amusing when they now provide Mr. Vickers with an outlet to voice his hatred and persistence against us on their website and mumble server

It seems to me he only voices his hatred through this forum and on TZM-IRC through so called sock-puppet accounts.
So much for solving problems with banning.
Do you Peter think that this guy Codie would stop spouting out his frustrations on the internet if we ban him?
Besides at RBOSE we're currently trying a model in where noone has authority to ban anyone, (for better or worse as of now).
I Think this is a great social experiment. If we succeed, the ramifications would be great.


peterjoseph wrote:

I want everyone to understand that the RBOSE is now a blacklisted organization for this reason.


As a person that has been working with the wiki on RBOSE.org, mostly on an open source project for farming.
And as someone that's daily on the rbose irc server...
What will my "punishment" so to speak, be?

Besides, let's say Codie is a member of facebook, you will not be blacklisting facebook aswell I assume.
But how would this be different from blacklisting RBOSE??
Also isn't this what is formally called "Guilt by association"... When you accuse an entire group, based on the actions of a few?


peterjoseph wrote:

I have been informed that they are contacting Groups/Chapters now in a possible attempt to divide the movement, so everyone please be aware of this if you are contacted by them.


I wouldn't have any idea of what it is your talking about really, I never heard anyone talk about this.
It seems to me that maybe it's just one individual that does this??
Besides what does it mean anyway to "attempt to divide the movement" in this case??

RBOSE has an "E" in it for a reason. From my perspective it could stand for an environment (E) dedicated to developing resource based, open source software and hardware. In that sense, calling it a "disgruntled group of individuals" would be misguiding, since it is only an environment for development. I value letting the development of individuals speak for itself. For that reason, RBOSE has been a valuable resource for me.

Keeping calm and balanced when approached with incompatible forms of information sharing (harassment, flaming etc.) can be extremely challenging. Therefore, with knowledge of that, i humbly request you to reevaluate your perspective of letting a few instances of unproductive collaboration represent the summed value of a vast and growing network of information (RBOSE), and the sharing of it. What do i mean with "unproductive collaboration"? Take for instance the claim of being "against" or "anti" anything. Specifically, anyone claiming to be "anti TZM" hasn't really thought about what it means. What does it mean? Semantically one could spend endless amounts of time juggling those words in search for meaning. However, we don't have to. Many developers within RBOSE has spent time on making sure that the actual products of the environment can speak for themselves, so that we don't have to waste time and preciseness doing it.

As a person that has been working with the wiki on RBOSE.org, mostly on an open source project for farming.
And as someone that's daily on the rbose irc server...
What will my "punishment" so to speak, be?

There is no such issue. Do as you wish. However, given their aggressive history towards us, I am not entertaining them in any way. That's all. I have no reason to and the Movement doesn't need to identify with yet another small offshoot that obviously doesn't even understand the direction.

Besides, let's say Codie is a member of facebook, you will not be blacklisting facebook aswell I assume.
But how would this be different from blacklisting RBOSE??
Also isn't this what is formally called "Guilt by association"... When you accuse an entire group, based on the actions of a few?

Once again, they have known about this and the RBOSE has been offensive toward myself and the admins.


peterjoseph wrote:

I have been informed that they are contacting Groups/Chapters now in a possible attempt to divide the movement, so everyone please be aware of this if you are contacted by them.
>>>

I wouldn't have any idea of what it is your talking about really, I never heard anyone talk about this.
It seems to me that maybe it's just one individual that does this??
Besides what does it mean anyway to "attempt to divide the movement" in this case??

Well, I do. Look- You like it? Go for it. Just know that there are attributes of this offshoot which are caustic and I am don't have the convenience of time to sit and discuss issue with a group that has publicly called me "deceptive" and "misleading" and the like, not to mention being offensive to others.

Oh- and Not to mention posting youtube video against myself.

You can play the "one bad seed theory" all you like. The entire basis of the RBOSE organization was founded on refusing to agree to the preexisting rules we had established for quality control and decency on this website- don't you dare make me the bad guy in this situation. I have tried my best. I wasn't the one who got angry and went off and did my own thing, posting insulting arrogant things publicly about the movement admins with nothing to support it.

Keeping calm and balanced when approached with incompatible forms of information sharing (harassment, flaming etc.) can be extremely challenging. Therefore, with knowledge of that, i humbly request you to reevaluate your perspective of letting a few instances of unproductive collaboration represent the summed value of a vast and growing network of information (RBOSE), and the sharing of it.

You are right. The bottom line is I see zero merit in the RBOSE as it is. If you like it- go for it. However, at this stage, there will be no advertising or support of them on this website or through any chapter due to:

1) The initial aggressive moves made out of the Movement and false accusations which have caused a public concern. ( with no apology)
2) The entertaining of people like C. Vickers who is far beyond some kid who is mad because he got banned. This guy is a sick sociopath - a history of which you have no idea. Does banning work? Only for some. As we know, it is patchwork- just like the restraining order we are getting against him for his constant harassment.

Sadly, there is no other option at this stage and any idealism about "talking to him" or the like is utterly naive in the face of his history.

Again, I'm sorry all this is happening. It isn't our fault and I refuse to let anymore time ( please see Tanktops post above) be wasted here on this person or this organization which, again, doesn't even relate to the Movements' overall goals. Making open source software is great- but it has little to do with the extreme need for educational work to be done in the public arena, which is the core focus of the movement at this time, apart from larger order research projects coming in regard to a systems approach to global RBE.

Also, please note that out of the 40,000+ current users maybe 60-70 unique bans have ever occurred on this site in nearly 2 years, many of which are repeat offenders that keep coming back...

That is hardly some abuse of power. We have been extremely tolerant and when I first started this site we didn't ban anyone. It was the rude awakening of relentless people who simply want to cause problems which made banning a sad reality.

From my point of view...nobody should waste time on this thing. He is probably happy that we paid so much attention to him. There are basic rules that everybody has to respect.