I am a nice person and a helpful guy, but found myself embroiled in a scandal after being nice and helpful. This post is a bit dull to begin with, but does warm up a bit!

As fully fledged members of the world wide web, we go to some serious forums and contribute in an adult and mature manner. We did a review of a new money-making website, and included no double entendres, nought remotely pisstaker-ish. It was a pretty boring review, actually, in which I pointed out a few coding issues. (Are you bored with this yet, cause I am!)

Anyway, the site under review had some good content and I even bookmarked it for future reference. There was a follow-up question about dodgy code. I got creative and did a quick screen capture to explain the quirkiness on the other site. To kill two birds with one stone, I used our site as a backdrop sort of thing for the video capture, the headlines ripped into our site's coding issues, I added some innocuous explanatory text and posted it as a blog on this site. Well, the open-minded webmaster of the "other" website followed the link from the forum to the video and wanted the video taken off the internet! It wasn't what they expected. Wow. It wasn't what we expected, either.

So why a video?

Why not just post a few lines like most other forum contributors? Simple answer. I had better things to do than write 500 words giving a useful and precise explanation of what a poorly coded Flash navigation bar looks like in Safari. A video is worth 1000 words and as it is a web design, creative types forum, what the hell. I was quite proud of how it took the piss out of our CSS issues whilst showing a small quirk with another site. I was speechless when asked to remove it from the www.

Why post a reply to a critique on another forum here?

You can't stick a video on a forum. Can you imagine how happy the forum owners would be hosting 4MB files? It would slow down and die a horrible death.

The so-say issue

If I read it right, the person who shall forthwith remain nameless, because we don't want them getting famous on our back, had a problem finding her forum laundry aired fairly and squarely on another site. Take it off the internet. I only want my site critique to appear in this forum's thread.

Do people not think things through? So, everything related to the website critique had to stay within the thread? Interesting concept.

No links will kill the internet.

If nobody can link to any 3rd party site from a forum thread - you know, link to a photo or video or other site, in order to add some flavor or color to their help - then the spirit of the internet is dead.

If there are no videos or photos allowed in a thread, what is the alternative means of communication? Well, it ain't pretty! Anyone wanting a critique of their website, according to that criterion, should submit a 12000 word essay to explain exactly what is going on with site layout, images, links... - and invite helpful replies That sounds just how the internet works in Never Never going to happen land.

How to control content on 3rd party sites.

How about this for a silly solution. Forum users could control content on external sites. Just ask your forum webmaster to host and monitor every single web site on the internet. In this way, all 3rd party points of reference that didn't fall within the expectations of certain forum users could be obliterated in-house without question.

The real issue?

Could it be that the location of the video is a bit dodgy, because with a name like Pisstakers, we must be up to no good, mentioning any website! Well, er, no. Relax. We think we have what the Spanish call, a good left hand. We rip into inconsistencies and stupidity, but don't criticise people or websites that don't merit it. Of course there is no censorship, yet, and until there is, we are comfortable with our policy - of ripping into people who act like asses.

Viral repercussions

Viral, man, it's perfect. A colleague's eyes lit up. We could really milk this, go viral, get famous over a complete freak event. The video they tried to ban!!!!! Not me. The only virus I am happy to handle is the 'flu. We want to build up our blogging name properly, so we set about soothing the situation. But by then, an Anzac had chipped in asking me to be nice and to remove the video. Two vaguely idiotic requests with no thought to what is being asked!

Two solutions to this particular issue.

Firstly, I am going to give the offended person permission to copy my inoffensive video and accompanying text in its entirety, and post it to any place they deem more appropriate. They may choose the trash, we suggest PotentiallyFantasticMoneyEarningSitesThatWeAren'tAllowedToMention OutsideOf Sitepoint.com? Oops, that domain name has more than 63 characters, so it aint allowed.

And secondly, before it gets out of hand, I am going to make a sensible suggestion, because I am a nice guy with a sense of fairness.

The final act of compassion

I have no inclination to delete my own work from my own website, unless the forum were incidentally called "Hello China here we come", in which case we would comply with the Chairman's request rather than face years in jail on rice and Nike. However, as I am a guest of a great free speech web design/web person's forum, I will be nice. I will try to edit the link in the critique thread so nobody can ever go directly ever again from that thread to the videopost on my blog.

There you go, wiped forever from the internet unless you have access to Google's recently cached pages!!!!!! or you click on my sig and arrive at The Pisstakers site, or you type our name in google. (Due to the gross unpopularity of our name as a keyword, you will definitely arrive at our homepage from any of the links monopolizing the first three search pages.)

And for anyone still sat pressing refresh to see what my response will be to any more crazy requests, please don't hold your breath. All responses of a satirical nature will be posted here, safe from the self-appointed thread censor.