Having probably had more interaction with their staff than you, that's not my experience whatsoever. They take pride in their site and do their best to keep it running. If I was staff on a site with 100K members I wouldn't give a crap about some bull excuses from an invite buyer, especially when you hear the exact same excuses 7 days a week. As for looking down on "lesser" members, I've never seen contempt shown for anyone that isn't getting hit with the banhammer. Personally I'd say there's more contempt shown between user class levels than between the staff and the regular members.
-And about that...it IS a job. Not a game. One problem with a lot of the What.cd admins I dealt with (especially in IRC) was that they acted like the whole situation was a game where they would win no matter what. Sort of like the book Catch 22. (No matter what you say to me, you are wrong and you will be banned/turned down/put down.)
The internet is srs business. As for being sure they'd win no matter what... it's their site and in the end, they decide whether you stay or go. To that end, they do win no matter what.
-I'm sure every tracker thinks they have cool admins. And despite everything I said above, you probably still know better than me just on principle. But the reality is that most trackers don't have cool admins. Helpful? Maybe. Knowledgable? Usually. Cool and nice? Well, I guess only a few trackers win that one.
If you spent more time in their help channel rather than their disabled channel, perhaps you'd see this in a different light.
I hope you don't mind me saying this, because What.cd is a cut above the rest in many aspects, but IMHO one of your "competing trackers" Waffles.fm has nicer people overall. More helpful? Perhaps not. But at least they try and don't call you a fool.
I've seen despicable things happen to people's accounts at Waffles, including spur of the moment bans for posts that barely warranted a warn. So if this is happening, I'd say it happens across the board.
The moral of the story here is that given the circumstances, there's no way he'd get his account back. Invites being sold on the very same board where he happened to receive a PM giving him one for free? That's stretching the limits of plausibility right there. And as for the staff hate, it seems to be a common theme here that the banned folks like to complain here, often behind fake usernames, about the staff on various sites. If you get banned, pick yourself up and move on. We're at a point in bittorrent now where we have multiple sites for every type of content, no need to get tied down to one.
See I believe this is the exact type of attitude that is hurting bt . "Making a name for yourself" and "deserving it"?
I always think these are really funny phrases when I see them, however I understand the underlying message. Would you rather invite someone you've seen elsewhere that you know won't be a total idiot, or some random stranger that turns out to troll worse than Swepsycho? And yes, this might lead to a lack of diversity of opinion on certain torrent sites, but it beats getting your account disabled when it turns out the guy you invited from a request thread at FST turns out to be a ratio cheater and gets your entire invite tree banned.
