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As I've brought up plenty of times in the past, I was an active Sal's user for way over a decade before eventually moving on from RuneScape. I will always be a Sal's member at heart, and as this blog evidences I will likely never stop visiting. All the years spent using Sal's - nearly half of my life - means I've grew up using the community. I've never been perfect, I've been immature, I've caused trouble and I know I wasn't always the easiest to deal with member of the community. One thing I've always tried to do, in my own flawed and sometimes immensely stupid manner, was to be helpful, liked by my peers, fun, and I too tried to always to stand for what I felt was right. From this I took inspiration from my friend @PKPete and his (in)famous "do what's right!" (one of the first Sal's clan section memes), who just like me could be a knucklehead, albeit a well intentioned one. In short, I was someone who meant well, but ironically not always went about "doing what's right", the right manner. That's how I perceive myself looking back to all these years ago. This was, of course, a recipe for disaster. Sal's always had it's trolls, but trolls while trolls usually have a clear objective: to rile people up for their own enjoyment, and even though it can be argued malice is involved, it's a different type of malice dissimilar to the malice people who legitimately just enjoy being asses to others have. The bullies. Just like many, I had my share of conflicts and drama with Sal's users who were simply put, the RunScape equivalent of bullies. People who thought themselves important, superior in a manner or other, and didn't care who they hurt, insulted or in a general sense walked all over. Anything and everything malicious they did was justified, in their opinion. One such people was Macki. Macki10 to be more specific, I believe his username was. Macki, as legend goes, was a player from Macedonia (or, as he called it: Mackidonia). I assume he started off as many others: a random RuneScape player looking for a community to establish himself in, to make friends and in a general sense to have fun playing RuneScape. I'm sure he was not always bad as he turned out to be, but I can't dismiss the possibility that he was and just hid it well. Macki was an alright RuneScape player, he had some decent achievements at a time everyone around here was basically a 'noob'. This means he grew in popularity quickly. His 'Skill Log' became one of the most popular, and he began recruiting a follower base of other players, as young or even younger as he was, easily impressionable and goaded into doing his bidding. I won't tag them here, but some of said players included PinkyTM, Sofee, Chaos, Dragons[numbers here] etc. Most of which (if not all) unlike Macki eventually redeemed themselves and became likeable individuals, and important parts of the community. But back in the days of Macki? Terrible pests. I won't straight out call them bullies, but they did the bidding of the bully. At this point, the 'fame' and arrogance seemed to have gotten the best of Macki, and he became a rather nasty individual. Or maybe the newfound popularity simply meant he could drop the 'nice guy' mask, and do what he always wanted to do. I'm no psychologist, so sadly I can only write what I remember the things he did and the manner he acted, I can't properly evaluate the why of his malice. And it's important to mention that perhaps he too grew as a person, and likely (and I hope it's the case) is no longer as much of an ass, or even an ass at all for that matter. But we deal with the consequences of our actions, and given what I'm about to describe next it'll likely always be impossible for me to look back and find and shred of sympathy for Macki. Macki and I got at odds for the first time, at a point in time I had began to become a house name. By this I mean I was no longer just another name in a huge online list. I was a "oh I know you, you're that guy" guy. I wasn't famous, but I wasn't a nobody either. If I wrote, even if I did write some stupid stuff more often than I'd like, people would read. And would remember. This is important, because it means when I stood up to Macki in that first 'fight' we've had, it wasn't just a random name fighting back. It was someone with friends, with the power - even if not that much power - to make other players turn their heads and question Macki's actions. And to this he took great offense. The interaction I'm talking about began in an average, regular day of a teen's gaming day. Like many others, myself and a considerable amount of Sal's players 50+ were online playing and using Salmoneus' Clan Chat (eventually renamed to just 'friend's chat', when they introduced the actual clan system years later). Out of nowhere a player joins, sounding a bit desperate and concerned, requesting help or at least advice. Dj Gavriel (future clan chat moderator) was this player. One of the nicest people you could have met back them. As polite and friendly as it gets, incapable of hurting a fly. Israeli, and a jew. Something he never felt the need to hide. Dj Gavriel came into the chat requesting help and advice, because he was being bullied. Harassed even, by Macki and some of his followers. Unfortunately it brings me no pleasure to say I vividly recall two of them there that day were PinkyTM and Sofee. And why? Dj Gavriel had joined Macki's friends chat/clan chat (oh he had grew to a popularity level where he considered himself too good for Sals chat, he had his own where only the VIPs could join), and made the mistake of trying to interact with some people and ask game questions. Macki saw the opportunity to make someone "weaker" in status than him feel like shizzle. Now, not only was this bad enough by itself, but Macki heard from his friends in Sals Chat that Gavriel had run there. So evidently, high and mighty Macki followed him with his 'gang'. He proceeded to continue insulting Gavriel, making fun of him (always with the help of his buddies, big man that he was) inclusively using anti-semitic jokes and insults to attack Gavriel. I was online and the rest is history. I got into a fight with him and his followers, other Sals members joined our side and eventually a staff member came online and punished Macki (but not without warning all of us too, after all they had to be impartial). And that's all it took for Macki's untouchable aura to take a hit, and his behaviour to worsen even more. From there he began causing more and more drama on the forums, getting warns left and right for things like blatant racism (Calling Obama a monkey and posting edited pictures of Obama eating bananas for example), topics with gratuitous insults towards people and staff members he did not like etc. All while encouraging his follower-base - still great at that point - to join him and do the same. Now this was always going to happen given the immaturity Macki as a person had at the time, nor do I claim or take any credit (which wouldn't even be something I'd want to take credit for) being the reason Macki went ballistic. He had problems with multiple people, of which I was only one. One of the people he disliked the most, certainly, but not the only one. The day eventually came, and Macki reached his +7 warn level, and with it he met Yuarang's banhammer. Maybe someone else did it, but I like to think it was Yuarang as it's always funnier. Macki's ban was no surprise to anyone at this point, especially not to Macki himself, who had already created his own forums and moved there with his 'fans' to essentially shizzle talk Sals, Sals Staff and anyone he did not like, not being shy of using rather nasty insults and tactics to damage the people he didn't like. Or as he so maturely referred to us: his enemies. My knowledge is very limited about what went there, and all I know is thanks to this one individual: Manofthing. @Mano Manofthing, or Mano as I referred to him, was a Sal's member who despite knowing and I assume being on friendly terms with Macki at some point, understood Macki's behavior had became unacceptable and tremendously immature. Mano was part of their forums, and would occasionally leak to me many of the nasty things Macki did. Unsurprisingly, I was one of his prime targets. Macki would snipe - or get someone to do it for him - real life pictures of me from the real life pictures topic, and edit images with very... immature things being done to my pictures, and let's just leave it at that. He would also do the same to others since he had an entire section dedicated just for that. The gravest thing he did however, at least when it comes to me, was create a fake email that was identical to mine letter by letter except in a special key. He used a '-', while mine had a '_'. At this time MSN was the place to be when it come to online chat, others like IRC existed but it wasn't everyone's cup o' tea, and MSN remained very popular. Well, turns out Macki went around adding people with his fake email pretending to be me, using my picture and name and sending again rather nasty tier things and insults to players, who not knowing me and my real email, promply believed I was the one doing these things to them. That's something a lot of people never learned about, but it's a prime example of Macki's behaviour and why he was such a hated member of Sal's Community. A lot of his friends never understood, they could never quite stomach why their friend Macki had been so 'mistreated' by the Sal's Staff and some of their members. Because they never got to see what Macki really was like. At least that's what I like to imagine, because the alternative is them knowing... and deciding they were okay with it. I hope you enjoyed the drama wall of text, more to come about others users in future entries. Bonus: ^ The above is a perfect example of my immaturity back then. Is the outrage justified? Absolutely. Did I say anything in that comment untruthful? I wish it had been the case, but all of it was objectively true at the time. The comment itself was still angsty though, aggressive and unnecesarily kept the drama going for longer even targetting people who may have deserved being called out, but still wasn't right. It perfectly exemplifies my teen self: well intentioned, and yet dumb. I tried to look at some of Macki's old posts to illustrate some of the things I mentioned in this topic, but sadly a lot is gone given that Macki was banned a long time ago. And most importantly: the bad things, bad and unnaceptable as they were, got all deleted, as content infringing the rules was usually removed. It becomes difficult to find examples, which probably aren't even necessary. Most people who'll read this probably had the displeasure of having to deal with Macki, so they know. This is however an example of his great attitude that must've escaped Yuarang back then (), and it was considered rather tame: tl;dr: "You have to be mentally challenged to do things I personally do not approve of, and if you disagree please go kill yourself" - Classic Macki