Weirdly, John Cheese comes over as a rather pleasant reasonable guy by e-mail. His original beef was that the PWOT article was inaccurate and he did not want to go to the hassle of fixing it. He sees his site as a self-contained pocket of bitter twisted humour that does not merit an encyclopedia article. He feels that he asked nicely for it to be removed but was either ignored or dismissed as a newbie. He has encouraged his friends to vandalise the site but has exhorted them to confine themselves to the PWOT article, its talk page and the VFD subpage.
Several things have goaded this group to higher levels of aggression: 1. The dismissal of their votes (which we did not explain). 2. The accusation that they are sockpuppets; we should check IP addresses before making such accusations. 3. The perceived arrogance of some sysops sending messages to the effect that they will never win because we can ban them all. That sort of claim escalates the conflict; we should avoid them if similar circumstances arise. 4. Belligerent comments on their board by "Zazzy" who claims to be a Wikipedia sysop and appears convincing. Zazy, if you are reading this, please try to be more temperate when jandling this sort of thing in the future. 5. Mis-spelling by geni (they particularly enjoyed 'vanderlism'); I imagine that this would be no problem were they not already enraged. 6. Statements by some VFD voters that their vote is simply to spite the POW members. I have trouble understanding how the voters failed to see how inflammatory this was. 7. This post: You know, there's more of us than there is of them: we could swamp the hell out of their little board, if we had the inclination... � ClockworkSoul 21:40, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Theo