I have avoided calling these folks out by name in the past. It has taken great effort. My stance has always been that if they aren't polluting the air here, let them be.
But they seem to hold a lot of sway in the online Kings community, so it's probably important someone says something: KingsFans.com is ridiculous. Absolutely fricking ridiculous.
The latest transgression, a recurring crime: Someone posted the full text of Henry Abbott's True Hoop post about Kevin Martin's high school coach. There was no reason to post the full text -- links actually work, it's amazing! -- and there are two big reasons not to post the full text: It's copyright infringement, and it's beyond rude.
Forget the first part, here's why it's rude: It is theft. Writers work their ass off to create content. Henry tracked down a high school basketball coach from Bumf*ck Ohio to talk about a relatively unknown kid. By taking that and posting it verbatim in another forum, you're removing any incentive for the reader to go over to True Hoop. ESPN isn't hurting for hits, sure, but it's a damn slippery slope. You're disincentivizing free content. If every two-bit message board reposted stuff from blogs and newspapers, those blogs and newspapers would start losing hits and that means they'd start losing incentive to find/create content. Is that what we want, less content? Because that's the end game here.
Nevermind the legal issues with stealing stuff. Blogs tend to be very proper with this stuff, snipping and linking and encouraging the wealth to be spread. KingsFans? No one there is allowed to link to the their own website -- not in a post, not in the signature, not if it's the most relevant link possible. (An example: When that whole Jason Hart thing went down, Sam Amick paraphrased a joke I made here without attributing to it. At KingsFans, they were arguing where the joke came from. One of the two site owners said Amick modified a joke someone on KingsFans wrote and then got all hussy about Amick not mentioning KingsFans by name. I stepped in, provided a link to the joke on my site, said I'd talked to Amick about it. My post, of course, got deleted. No self-promotion. Said site owner then posted some ridiculous note saying 'The joke is not from KingsFans.' Way to inform your members.)
Anyways, so yeah -- stealing Henry's hard work. Not cool. I made a post yesterday afternoon to that affect. I bet you can guess what happened to it. Deleted. Almost immediately. The post with the full article? Still there. Message: It's OK to steal; it's not OK to protest said stealing.
It wouldn't be a big deal if it were a one time occurance. It happens multiple times a day. They steal The Bee's stuff, other blog stuff, SI, ESPN, anything that pops up on HoopsHype, pretty much any content which can be copied and pasted, they steal. And if you say a damn thing about it (or anything negative about KingsFans, or by extension positive about another Kings community), your post gets deleted.
But they can't delete anything here. So humor me folks, while I make my feeling on this: Hey, proprietors of KingsFans: YOU SUCK.
This is another way of saying, 'Hey, Sactown Royalty community: You guys are awesome. You know I'm not a dictator like those folks, but you still don't take advantage of that. I really really appreciate that. Thank you.'
(Back to non-boring programming people other than me care about.)
UPDATE: Of course. I saw this one coming. A message from one of the moderators at KF: