To address ...
...obviously unfairly and disrespectfully.
Thanks for your long detailed response which shows a lot of good faith effort and significant commitment to understanding and correcting.
We can go on doing this forever, so I'm ok if you don't try to explain why this happened. I'm deeply involved since I've found that this forum is very helpful to my understanding of emotional behavior which I was never good at. Also, I don't have anything better to do that's this engaging. As to why it's another topic...
I'm trying to apologize for any of my behavior that made the situation worse and defending, explaining my response.
I appologize if I was wrong about some negative rash characterizations of rampage. However, he was way worse in his rash characterization and banning of mongers. This caused significant anger at the people in control, more than at batshit crazy rampage.
Widespread anger against an organization is dangerous to the organization. When several individuals share the same anger, it often empowers them to take action. Numerous threats are symptomatic of something seriously wrong. It starts out as complaining, but if complaining doesn't work, it moves to threats, then action. Keep in mind that if the action is viable, then the threat is more effective.
Personal threats are fairly meaningless, just like most of rampages threats. They are symbolic, their value is in their shock value. Personal threats at anybody, if not obviously metaphors, I think are good grounds for banning if the threat is illegal.
However, threats against taking the organization down are different. If an organization take down threat is viable, the monger making the threat is least of your worries. Often the invisible threats are worse from LE, anti-prostition political, IRS, invisible mongers, etc. And the monger making the visible threat, usually only wants to present it as a way to pressure ampreviews into solving the rampage problem. Since you guys self destructed, no point in continuing to threaten the organization.
It seems that for mongers who highly value their anonymity, the last thing they would want is to annouce they are trying to take down ampreviews. For every declared monger threat, there might be 5 to 10 mongers who don't want to annouce they are trying to destroy ampreviews.
I also appologize for threats that caused distress. I think it's good you complained about them. I would be upset about them also. I'm not surprised you got a lot of threats. It reflects the magnitude of hurt feelings and number of guys feeling violated from getting banned which masculine mongers inherently don't want to admit their emotional vulnerabiliy or weakness. Rather, getting wounded causes attacking threats.
Conversely, the same blocked hurt feelings guys won't understand they are automatically attacking, often disproportionally in response to getting hurt. Also, anger blocks feeling hurt from attacks in oneself and reverses bad feelings in others to feel good over their misfortune. Actually, if you are angry at someone, you often initially feel good if they get hurt, and only then after the anger subsides empathetically feel bad them.
A lot of us,.I suspect feel good about rampage getting axed, he might feel like shit. But, as a warning, you need to gard against rampage trashing ampreviews for revenge. Hopefully, you changed locks and logins, etc.
To get back in as a new member because of rampage's efforts, required new email, new ip address (vpn), and first clearing cookies on your browser. Even the email confirmation link, you had to be careful that the email browser cookies didn't have previously banned info. Even now, the browser still requires clearing cookies after seeing a banned response on another login.
The other difficulty was email providers limited the number of new unrelated emails.
Rampage seemed to have software skills to implement all the permanent banning, making me wonder that he got his moderator position from helping to design ampreviews.
Even after you got a new login, you had wasted all your review credits, and other mongers you've been pming needed to be told your new identity. Also you would lose your PM messaging history which was a big complaint of a fellow monger.
Why do we care, why don't we go elsewhere?
Well some did go to TER (The Erotic Review), but a lot were already on TER.
Unbeknownst to themselves, ampreviews designers created a monster that would fight to stay alive. Certainly rampage seemed jealously trying to protect it. Jealousy like anger destroys relationships.
From our perspective, ampreviews public real time comments and active dialog produced a very strong shared emotional hook arising from sex and money, both evokers of very strong emotions for active members from the only community forum for mongers who, myself included, spend $10,000 a year on sex and spend hours of effort trying not to waste so much money because pics are usually 10 years old and first reviews are shill. The comments and dialog are more credible than reviews. The sometimes intensity of emotions make it difficult to make it "light" and not so serious, and I would love for it to be that way, but...
It seemed that dialog and review contributors, myself included, would re-signup many times after getting banned, despite being pissed about getting banned. There was no other viable review site in SF area that had real time public comments and dialog. We were addicted.
This public real time comment and dialog hook is why ampreviews, with a shoe string development, in 4 years gained maybe 20% market share against established TER, despite TER having way better reviews, search, and organizing all reviews under the same provider.
Because of ampreviews severe anonymity, it looked like ampreviews didn't want to get bigger, like they were trying to stay under the radar of the feds, LE? The small provider sites, don't seem to get legally hassled. Rather, it was bigger CityVibe getting ad fees for different providers that got shut down.
And it's not the member's fault that ampreviews looks pretty sketchy. I'm sure the site anonymity was to protect the privacy of TJ, moderators and anyone else who worked on it, just like mongers want anonymity, but it makes the site look like it has something to hide legally. At least the money going in is back to their old Las Vegas credit card processer. Previously before rampage got outed, the credit card processor had been moved to Switzerland which also looks sketchy for a US review site. Was this rampages doing?
Finally, I suspect there is a lot of resentment. I praise your efforts, but don't expect any praise from most others. A lot of guys will give you shit about why you guys were so slow to recognize the problem, rather than giving you cudos. I also think moderators should be paid, at least enough to pay for there hobby. There was some money coming in, probably not much, but enough. And, I would think there are ways to reduce moderation work, like using an AI tool or active members to flag. There is another whole thing moderation, but Silicon Valley learned long ago that software guys have poor understanding of how to mitigate bad human behavior. Note Musk also trashing the value of twitter over loosening moderation rules.
