I missed the last bits of drama in the original "Reveille's in a coma" thread that then led to this thread. I just caught up reading all 15 pages.
I'm not going to say I thought it was a fake when I first saw the original thread. I thought it had some odd factors, and I didn't post to it, though I thought about it, because when somebody's sick, that's what you do, you send support.
I thought it odd, that a fiance would think to visit a gaming forum when her SO is in the hospital. There's an 80% chance she is co-habitating with the SO, so she should have been able to use his account directly, rather than make a new account (who logs out on a secure PC?). I thought it odd, if she had to make an account, she'd know which site to goto, and what his screen-name was and spelled it right. It would have been more believable if she'd used HIS account.
Reveille pulled the same trick that jerks who betray the party do. He was already in the party, and decided to pull this. It's not hard to lie to somebody, when you're already inside the circle of trust. This is why 80% of all hack attempts are inside jobs, they're inside the circle of trust. Folks who believed him did the right thing. The only remaining thing to have done, would have been to ask, "what city, hosptital and room is Reveille in, so I can send flowers" to start locking facts in to the real world.
I keep using Reveille's full screen name for a reason. While it may be a military wake-up song, it's also the name of Texas A&M's mascot. Aggies are a fanatical lot, I work with a ton of them. One thing they got is a oath.
"An Aggie will not cheat, lie or steal, nor tolerate those who do."
Now there are cases of Aggie's gone bad, just like all people, but that oath means something to most of them. It's the same oath most military officers take during training, which makes sense given that A&M is also a military school.
That oath has an important clause to it. "...nor tolerate those who do." It doesn't mean hunt them down vigilante style. It means to not keep company with them. It means to leave their presence as soon as possible, or cast them out of your space. This is a pretty good justification of why Reveille is permanently banned. He didn't just lie once, for a joke, he lied a bunch. He's a liar, and that causes trouble, which we do not have to tolerate.
When the news of his fake coma broke, there were cries that this was a monsterous thing to do. I'd suggest, that as a single "prank", while the impact may be severe, the thinking behind the prank may not be monsterous, simply short-sighted. Drunk drivers do monsterous things, but for the most part, they're not even thinking of hurting anybody. Granted, later, the thread revealed there was a long chain of deception and manipulation going on. That's monsterous. The difference seems to have been lost on folks in the early phase of this thread.
For those who seek to contact Reveille, and get his side of things, I ask to what end? Reveille's a proven liar in this community. Worse, he's a proven manipulator and fabricator of heart-wrenching, sympathy garnering stories. If it was just the one joke, then you might get a valid explanation and apology. At this stage, given all that's been revealed about his activities, it would be foolish to trust a man who is known for lying to people to garner support.
The last order of business is sock puppet accounts. On every other forum I am on, users are limited to one account. There's no active search for them, but if they're found out, they're dealt with. For the most part, having an alt account and using it in a conversation is a ploy for decieving others, hiding your identity (such as it is in an already anonymous environment). The only time an alternate identity makes sense, is in role-playing. Most of the sub-forums on this site are for discussing role-playing. The only place alt accounts should be acceptable is within the ROLE-PLAYING in a game sub-forums.
To sum up, whether the mods make a rule or not, it should become a social standard that using alt accounts outside of a role-playing/story-telling space is deceptive, which violates the Aggie creed, which ought to be an American creed, because it's a good standard.
