Banned - 8th Agust 2004

Well, I remain banned from posting in the Doctors.net.uk forums. There appears to be a lot of gossip about what I have and haven't done to get banned, so I feel that I should set the record straight. Here it is, from the Fish's mouth.

I have always expressed concerns about DNUK security. Although this has improved slightly in the last few months, it remains very easy to get a false identity. A while back, I made several postings to highlight this. These were answered by the DNUK staff stating that they thought the then current checks were sufficient. I demonstrate what I thought of their security, I created three fake identities - those of Dr Hilary Jones, balding GMTV doctor; Evan Harris PM, Lib Dem health spokesman; and Professor Liam Donaldson. As you can see, these are not simple random doctors, and I had suddenly created an email address for all of them. I used each of them to post on a forum thread entitled 'DNUK security', and then emailed DNUK to ask for the identities to be deleted, and telling them how I did it.

One would think that DNUK would thank me for highlighting a loophole that any member of the public could exploit. Instead, they banned me for a week, stating 'breech of the terms and conditions'. No warning was issues, just a straight ban.

Perhaps I should have learnt from this example. The DNUK staff do not seem to be terribly flexible in their humour. Recently, it emerged that some of the member survey results on DNUK had been sold off, apparently to the BBC and to the C**servative party. To be fair, only the results had been sold off, not membership information or individual opinion. And again, to be fair, on the survey web page, there was apparently small print stating that the results would be available to a 'political organisation'. Following this, the media was plastered with headlines such as '97% of doctors make fatal mistakes'. And many members, including myself were very unhappy.

I loathe the Tory party and anything it stands for. And I loathe the fact that I unwittingly was duped into providing election fodder for them. I felt that DNUK had taken us all for a ride. And throughout this, the DNUK CEO kept very, very quiet in the Q&A forum.

And so I created a photo-shop image. The image was downloaded from b3ta.com and I believe it has appeared in several mens lifestyle magazines prior to this. It was simple to add Neil Bacon's head to this image. And this was the result (not safe for work). A link to this picture was posted on the jokes and humour forum, along with a 'not safe for work' warning. And it stayed there for a couple of weeks, and received the best part of 50 'top quality votes'.

Then one day I couldn't enter the DNUK forums. An email from Tim Ringrose stated that I had breached the terms and conditions and was banned from posting for 6 months. He stated that no further correspondence was to be entered into.

So, there you have it. No warnings, no correspondence; I've been banned. I know that DNUK is easy to hack into. However, the pleasure of using the site was to post as myself (or Fishgoth, I should say), so I don't particularly want to do this. I guess I shall have to wait until the start of the new year.

In the mean time, thanks to Sharon Cain, who organised a petition for me to be re-instated. And thanks to the 270+ people to signed it. And thanks to Chloe Fairbairns for posting an open letter to everyone at DNUK. My advice to everyone on the site is not to do what I have done. Do not speak out, or make comments or jokes that seem remotely offensive. And don’t rely on people having a sense of humour, either. Certainly, don’t get labelled a troublemaker, as I guess you too will lose the benefit from surfing the fora.