Saying something II

Just a footnote to the banning of Carl Hibbard from the English Chess Federation's online forum, as per yesterday's post. This touched on the fact that Carl was accused, by the ECF's Commercial Director, Bob Kane, of being "registered from day one in one name or another"

which is to say, of having registered in a names or names other than his own.

Evidence of this assertion was requested

but at the time of writing had not been forthcoming.

Now there's a trivial but interesting point relating to this, which is that in that forum's early days, it possessed a poster called "Sue Dunham" which, as even the doziest of us eventually realised, was not a real name but...yes indeed, a pseudonym. Ho ho.

This particular sock-puppet lasted several weeks until disappearing, or rather being asked to disappear.

So what? Well the curious thing was the extraordinary early stage at which Sue Dunham registered for the forum:

"Sue" was the 2nd person to sign up.

For a sock-puppet, a false name, to register quite so early is surprising: common sense suggests that the earliest registrations with a site are likely to be people involved with setting up that site.

But who? I don't know for sure, but I believe Bob Kane may do, since given that he had a discussion

between "sue" and myself

there's a decent chance he was aware of Sue's identity.

As it happens, the Bob Kane who had that discussion was the same Bob Kane who has Carl Hibbard down as registering in "one name or another". A trivial matter, barely worth wasting a blog post on, but it's Mr Kane who's decided to make a big thing about trivial matters, is it not?

Now seeing as Mr Kane is exercised about the issue of false-name registrations and as he's prepared to bandy about (but not back up) accusations against less exalted individuals, it's really about time he told us whether or not the "Sue Dunham" with whom he had this discussion was an ECF official.

Because as it stands, we've got ECF officials throwing accusations at one chap, accusations that they won't back up - when we have every reason to suspect that one ECF official or another may have done precisely the thing the chap's accused of.