About
Please Read: On March 10th, 2008, Gaia simultaneously banned hundreds, perhaps thousands of users without cause. Details can be found here, here and here. After a week, Gaia admitted that a mistake had been made, but only freed some of the blocked accounts (I estimate 40%), claiming that the rest had all been botting.These still blocked accounts were a cross section of Gaian society, from the youngest to the oldest members, many were not logged in that day, those that were were all doing different things. In short they are what you would get if you selected a bunch of Gaians completely at random. Some of them of them had invested hundreds or thousands of real dollars in buying Gaia cash, others had equally obvious reasons for not botting. Most obviously lacked the technical skills to do so. In short, it is obvious to anyone who paid attention to the whole mess that these people were innocent. It is certainly easy to tell that my own account was innocent, but I find it equally easy to tell in dozens of other cases.
Gaia's claims that they had been carefully checked and were obviously botting can only be explained in two ways that I can think of: 1) they were just plain lying to avoid pursuing things further - I don't see their motivation for doing that, really or 2) their methods of monitoring user activity are horribly broken and Gaia is in denial about that, choosing to believe their bad data rather than examine the cases enough to see the contradictions in that data.
In the end though, the whys don't matter. What matters is the certainty that Gaia has banned innocent accounts at random and will continue to do so. Sooner or later I will lose this account for no reason, just as I lost the other one. Sooner or later, if you stick around, the same will happen to you.
So I'm saying goodbye now, while I still have control over my profile. I will still be on Gaia for a while, because I am a crew member in the March 10 Martyrs guild, which exists to support the victims, but beyond that, I don't think an account that will randomly dissappear someday is worth my time.
I have met some wonderful people on Gaia and experienced some great communities here. I wish you all the best of luck. I hope Gaia wakes up to their own problems in time for you.
Good bye.
I'm a 41 year old Bioinformatics programmer in New England with a wife and two daughters (6 and 2). As evidence that I've gone mad, I'm also a graduate student at Brandeis, a Past Master of my local Masonic Lodge and GM and player, respectively, in two active AD&D campaigns (2nd. Ed.).
I tell people that instead of buying a sports car, I'm spending my mid-life crisis getting a Master's degree, but that might also be why I'm on Gaia. I prefer to think its because I like anime and as a computer professional and parent of two teenagers-in-training, Gaia is the sort of thing I should be paying attention to.
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If you ever need another envelope, lemme know biggrin
but i am here to offer 64k ea all your sealed letters