Hey MrLex,
See, the thing is, we as staff members deal with a lot of invite sellers. We know quite a bit about their business model, including diversionary tactics, injections of plausible deniability, and a "don't admit to anything in the disabled channel and I'll send you another invite" clause. The great amount of discouragement invite buyers get from telling the truth makes it extremely difficult to trust anyone invited by a known seller.
In your case, the person who invited you was selling invites on the exact same board. While it's possible that you didn't buy the invite yourself, it is difficult to believe that you didn't know it was going on. You underestimate the amount of time and effort you could have saved everyone had you simply reported him. As such, I agree with TedMaul's decision to leave you disabled.
Now, in response to this:
Here's the thing about What.cd. And I mean this in the nicest way possible, so don't confuse my point. 80% of the admins there have some sort of issue. Some of them are on an ego trip, some are paranoid, others are very elitist. Some have all of these problems.
It may seem that way to someone who was banned from the tracker, I'll warrant that. But becoming staff on our site is hard. You have to demonstrate hard work, commitment and all those things, but the most serious thing that we look for is whether or not you're a cool dude.
Look at it this way. You're staff on a site. You devote 90% of your free time to a hundred thousand people you've never met. What does this entail? This entails deleting and editing torrents uploaded by stupid/malicious people to keep the torrent quality high. This includes moderating the forums to keep the community from degenerating into 4chan. This includes keeping the members of the site safe from possible arrests. And this includes, instead of simply glining or ignoring people who have been disabled the way many other trackers do, running a very busy channel where they can come to speak directly to staff members.
Now, imagine you had a job where you had to spend 6+ hours a day being lied to by scumbags who don't give a shit about everything you've worked for. This is what running the disabled channel and talking to hit and runners, traders, sellers, and cheaters all day is like.
How long do you think you'd last in that job, before you lost faith in humanity and suffered from a mental breakdown?
If you're like most people, you'd probably last a couple weeks. Now, imagine being a What.CD staffer, where you have to deal with this every day, during your free time, for months and months. Do you have any idea how cool you have to be in order to do all this, without being compensated at all, and not start tearing your hair out?
The paranoia comment you made is probably true. Our paranoia isn't unwarranted though - arrests for running sites like this may seem surreal to you, but they're very much a part of our realities as staff members.
But we continue staffing. Why?
Is it because we're elitist? Is it because we're on permanent ego trips? I wouldn't say so.
We do what we do because we believe that the world needs it. We delete transcodes because they harm the quality of the site. We ban cheaters because they harm the site economy. We ban the trees of invite abusers to keep people safe. And we do this, for no reward but the loss of free time and the risk of arrest, because we love the site.
We love the site, we love the music collection, and we love the community that surrounds it all. And we do what we do to keep it all working.
And you call us elitist ego tripping paranoiacs.
I hope I've changed your opinion on the What.CD staff - you may not get that impression when you're in a channel normally frequented by the bane of the torrenting world, but everyone on the What.CD staff is
extremely cool. If not, there's no way they'd be able to handle it.
