United Package Smashers

Brown Cafe “Bans” United Package Smashers Webmaster

December 18, 2007 – 10:20 pm

Revenge for publishing The UPS / Cargo Largo Connection was swift over at Brown Cafe, an Internet forum where alot of UPS employees congregate. Most of them like their jobs and insist that they’d never hurt a package. Additionally, most of them also dislike me, because I don’t like some of the things UPS does. In a thread started on the topic of this website more than a year before I joined the site by another user - who happens to be a UPS Employee who likes his job - I mentioned the fact that I was working on a major story that would be a big deal. I routinely patrol the internet to see what people are saying about this site so I can find leads on more stories. Several BrownCafe users doubted the legitimacy of my claim and said as much publicly, so when I published the story, I posted a link to it there.

After all, it was relevant to the thread and was not spam. United Package Smashers does not sell anything on this website except the truth and the price for that is free. Note that we are working to bring back the ever-popular UPS store with all-new products, so that will soon change. But if I was looking to spam my site (which I don’t need to do, I have already been written up in Forbes Magazine and Smart Money Magazine - the only things I have yet to conquer with this site are USA Today, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and CNN), as some of the Brown Cafe users claimed. Anyway, I digress.

Almost immediately, I started having trouble with my Brown Cafe forum account. When I access the site through a proxy server, it loads right away. And when I access it on my own PC after I have cleared my cookies and cache, it works great. Several friends who I asked to check it were able to get in just fine. But as soon as I login, the server loads very slowly, I get random server busy errors, redirected to the main page and other various performance issues. Now, Brown Cafe runs vBulletin, a software package that competes with Simple Machines Forum (which we use here) and one of the most popular “hacks” for vBulletin is a program called Miserable User. Basically, it lets the admin of a given forum harass and annoy specific end users for the sheer fun of it.

Its a shame people can’t take a more respectable approach to online debating a viewpoint and instead have to use their moderator or admin status to get rid of users whose viewpoints they don’t agree with in order to “win” the debate. Civilized debates is something we have all the time here at United Package Smashers. And for that matter, debating is something I like doing. I am good at it. One of my gifts is that of the poison pen - as this site attests. But I don’t ban people from our forum that I disagree with, I let them write their comments to posts on the front end and I even approve them in the moderation system. Then again, I suppose all this just might have something to do with the mentality that both UPS management and Browncafe have in common: if we don’t agree with it, it must be silenced.

UPDATE: My account at Brown Cafe mysteriously started working again and there was already someone on the forum poking fun at this story and accusing me of making this all up. A little bit of honesty and integrity goes along way.