Hello, Mark,
First of all, I know where you live. You live at 13007 Whitestone Dr. in Tampa, FL 33617, do you not? Yeah, you may not have posted your address on your website, but that doesn't mean it can't be found. So, I will be able to serve you with a service of process, should it come to that. Hopefully, it won't come to that; I hope you'll do the right thing, and I won't have to make you do the right thing!
Now, let me go down the list of various legal facts. Then, I will get to the facts of my particular situation. You may have a lawyer confirm these facts for you if you think it is financially worth it (considering that all I am asking of you right now is injunctive relief, which you can give for free and in a few minutes).
-Your page about legal information does not state a personal jurisdiction. Therefore, if I sue you, you'll be defending yourself here in my home town, where I'll have the home turf advantage, not you. Granted, what's going on here would be illegal, even there in Florida; this is just to prove a point.
-You may listed, in your legal information, that you are not to be held responsible for anything that goes on on your site, but that's bull and won't be enforced. Waivers are typically only enforced when act or omission was unintentional, and while your acts or omissions may be unintentional so far, the fact that I am telling you about this situation makes any further omission to fix the problem intentional.
-Even Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act does not protect you. To quote legal scholar Brandy Jennifer Glad, "If an Internet content provider, and definitely an Internet content facilitator, has reason to know, or anticipate, that at least some of the postings on their website are defamatory, false, anonymous, annoying, or harassing in nature, then they should be considered a co-author of... and be just as liable as the original poster, loosing their Section 230 immunity completely, and be subject to full monetary, legal, and equitable damages by the aggrieved party. This also should apply to website owners who edit even slightly, or alter the defamatory, false, anonymous, annoying, or harassing material by purposely indexing the postings to search engines." Even if you didn't create this content, you did facilitate its communication, and you definitely advertise on Google!
-The mods are your employees. They may not be paid for their work, but that only makes them volunteer employees, but still employees nonetheless. It's just like people donating their labor to a charity; the charity is still liable for anything that the employees do via respondiat superior.
And yes, they are employees. Look up the difference between employee and independent contractor. You're an employer when you have the contractual right (even if you don't exercise it; the bottom line is that you have the contractual right) to dictate the terms and details of how the work is performed, and if you provide them with all the tools needed (in this case, the website, and access to the mod's tools).
Now, that being said, allow me to explain to you the situation I am having on your site.
On your forums, someone had insulted me (my username is dstebbins). The rules of the forum specifically state that you must be courteous to others, so I reported that person. They refused to take down the post and give an infraction to the person who insulted me. This created the implied contract that the rules could be ignored. The United States Supreme Court defines an implied-in-act contract as "founded upon a meeting of minds, which, although not embodied in an express contract, is inferred, as a fact, from conduct of the parties showing, in the light of the surrounding circumstances, their tacit understanding." See, the conduct of the mods, light of the surrounding circumstances, implied that the rules were not enforced. Therefore, I took them up on that offer.
Therefore, by banning me (or even giving me an infraction), they breached that implied contract.
Simply put, to settle out of court, I want the following done:
1. My ban is lifted.
2. The mods who inconsistently enforced their rules are stripped of their mod powers.
3. The rules are brightly defined, and mods no longer have the option of refusing to enforce them.
Thank you. Have a nice day.
