The reddit ban...

I can't begin to say how excited I am that a couple of my reddit friends have found me! I loved that little community so much and I hope to (cautiously) build that up again! I will talk more about that in a sec...

For those of you who have been following me know that my family is moving to Arizona. Our current plan is that we all move in December so it can align with my job coming to an end and the kids finishing out the first part of the year.  With the holiday weekend, we decided to fly out and just get a feel for the area. I am sort of sad to say I didn't instantly fall in love it with here but I am really hoping it grows on me. The town seems a little bit...run down...and while we have met some very friendly people, it doesn't quite have that "everyone's a neighbor, everyone's a friend" feeling that I'm used to back home in Texas. Yesterday we did a ton of driving and I wasn't feeling particularly great (I really hope I start to feel better in the second trimester) and even though it seemed like it was going to rain, the air here is still so dry. We are going to relax a bit today and I'm really hoping that makes me feel more attached to my soon to be new hometown. 

On to the reddit ban, some of you will of course know this but to get everyone up to speed...

After my story died down on public Reddit I decided that I would continue to post on my own profile as an outlet suggested by our marriage counselor. This whole event was the first time I'd ever had a reddit account so I was pretty unfamiliar with how it worked and thought posting to my profile would be more of like a private blog.  Within just a few days, I actually had a very sweet and dedicated following who seemed to enjoy reading about my past, present and even future. I thoroughly enjoyed posting to Reddit and 90% of the comments I got were positive. There would still be people who would find my from the original posts or YouTube who enjoyed the negativity but the slowly started to filter themselves out. 

However, as much as I even hate to mention him, I had one very dedicated troll who was/were hell bent on exposing who I was in real life. Whoever this was created hundreds of accounts to attack, harass and even physically threaten myself and my family (the sheer number of accounts created leads my husband to believe it was three or four people but the style of posting, the words used, were so similar that it leads me to believe it was one person). Over the course of a few months not only did this person post publicly on my page, but he sent me well over 1000 (it could even be many multiples of that) direct messages. Most of the time it was things like "I know you really live in El Paso County and you name real name is Jane Doe and I'm going to get you fired for being a whore." But occasionally the messages would be really sick things like personal threats to me and my kids with specific dates, times and locations. He never figured out my real name and he got close a few times with location but I still think those were lucky guesses. It got so bad that we did contact a lawyer and basically said to save screenshots of everything but in the long run there really isn't much that can be done unless he actually physically presents himself. 

Although I don't know for sure, I think the troll is why reddit banned me. Last week, the troll created a username very similar to mine and spent several days posting to my profile where he would call me every name in the book and refer to my husband and kids as very disparaging terms. At first it was his very normal style but then he started publicly saying many of the things he'd previously reserved for private messages. I didn't engage him in his messages and would remove his posts as soon as I could. However, since it was the first week of school, the messages sat up there for hours instead of minutes. After I went through and made sure all of his comments were removed I posted what I thought was a very sincere warning to him that he'd crossed a line and tried to appeal to him that he wasn't actually affecting me, but by stating actual names he was potentially putting women who had nothing to do with me in danger. I believe it was Wednesday evening, I noticed that that his account had been permanently suspended and I felt an enormous sense of relief. His modus previously had been to leave things up for a few hours, delete the entire account and then start over a few minutes later. With the account being suspended, I figured reddit was finally on to him. 

I was shocked to wake up in the morning to find that my account had also been permanently suspended and I saw this message: 

The only infraction I'd ever committed on reddit was I had been banned from several of the infidelity subs for reasons I don't even recall. I never received another warning that I was doing anything wrong and 90% of my activity was to my own profile and babybumps. I figured it was just a mistake and maybe they mixed up the usernames since the troll had created one so similar to mine. I very promptly hit the appeal button. About 12 hours later they sent me this:  

My guess is that a human never even looked at it. I created a new account thinking that while that account was dead, I still had access to usernames of people I'd gotten to know and could reach out to them and just say that I was ok. That account was banned and and the appeal denied.  My husband was overseas at the time for work and not really monitoring reddit so I texted him and sure enough the account that started all of this was banned. He was too busy at the time so he figured we must have some sort of IP ban and he would look into it when he got home. He's not new to reddit and has an account for 13ish years (I didn't even know reddit had been around that long) and that account is not banned so that sort of rules out that they are tracking our IP addresses. 

I guess the short answer to all of this is we don't know why we were banned. The two screenshots I've posted are all I've received from reddit and they only give you 250 characters to question or appeal a ban. I'm internet savvy enough but since my husband works in tech and knows a little bit more about it, his opinion is that one of two things happened or maybe a combination of both. First that the troll used all of his accounts, and remember there were hundreds of them, maybe over thousands, to report all of our posts and comments and we were suspended by a bot because we achieved some sort of report threshold. The other option is that when the troll started posting actual names and locations publicly, a human looked into it and decided that it was just easier to make it all go away than deal with me continuing to post and attracting the troll. I have some some research and most of the time messages like the one above are reserved for people who violate the rules with multiple accounts and after receiving many warnings. Neither of which apply to me. 

For those of you who are familiar with my story, I definitely don't want anyone to contact reddit on my behalf. For now I still have access to the account (I just can't reply, post, or vote) and I'm worried that any contact my just annoy them and they'll remove my access before I have time to move everything here. I really cherish some of those OPs (especially the three about how Bubs and I met, why I call him Bubs and our wedding) and I really want to make sure they are preserved, edited and put up somewhere so our kids can read them some day. 

Anyways...so glad some of you have found me again, I know I saw in a comment that some of you were chatting with each other about what happened. If you know someone who was a legit supporter, please feel free to send them here!  Bubs and the kids are charging into the hotel room like a herd of wet buffalo after being at the pool so I need to change hats from "bad grammar blogger" to "mom." Have a great Sunday everyone!