The Devine Commandments of the Church of ModernVespa

Scientology has nothing on some ModernVespa leaders.

The ModernVespa forum admin, Jess Devine, and a couple insiders (not all and not regular members!) immediately reverted to their dishonest tactics when confronted about them, thus proving exactly what we said earlier about their manipulating info and attacking non-sponsors.

(Compare an honest, well-run forum where they will put up a link to friends’ shops, but staff never manipulate debate and never attack competitors. Only MV staff do this.)

Starting only 6 minutes after one person posted “ScootRS are a good supplier, no affiliation,” staff piled on with the same old tactics, with the Holy Admin himself waiting only 19 minutes before attempting to bully and undermine the poster, demanding “What are you trying to hide?”

Is that a common question by forum admins if you mildly praise someone, “What are you trying to hide?” Or something you hear only in Scientology or confessionals? Between attacks and bans, no wonder people are afraid to post openly against official dogma there.

Again, exactly as we detailed, the Holy Admin and his apostles justify their fair game tactics by repeating their fact-free delusions that anyone supporting ScootRS is actually us “shilling” behind the scenes. Apparently the Devil is everywhere - and 10,000 mentions around the world were all us in 20 languages. Good god, there are even paranoid admin posts that warn we're about to secretly alter reality any moment now. Ghost stories are great for scaring the uninformed toward friends and overpriced sponsors.

(Long after the admin locked our account, we did actually create a personal account when he asked for feedback “On moderation and personal attacks” and asked why he does nothing when his staff are making all the attacks, but we never hid who we were and openly said so when asked. The Holy Admin avoided the question, deleted posts, banned that account too and quickly locked the thread. So much for church reform. We never returned, despite the ghost stories.)

Proving how dishonestly hypocritical some Modernvespa leaders are, one moderator actually posted that the problem with ScootRS has “nothing to do with [our] business or [our] products. Purely to do with [our] abuse of normal decorum.” However, if you actually verify that and start by searching just one word, you already find 17 posts where this so-called moderator has attacked people as a “lying gouging scumbag,” “lying cheating scumbag,” “scumbag shyster,” “lying scumbag rip-off merchant,” etc., etc. Other ModernVespa moderators post about urinating on “slimeball” competitors and giving them a “morbid, abnormal, incurable flesh eating disease.” And much more, all officially and hypocritically blessed by the Holy Admin as “normal decorum” toward those not paying him money.

In contrast, you can see all of our posts here. The fact is, between July 2007 when we joined and Aug. 2008 when excommunicated as a threat, we made a whopping total of 47 posts, only 3.6 per month, some just asking moderators to stop their attacks. No one with either a spine or a mind is cowed by Church propaganda when they can verify for themselves exactly how people posted.

Here, for example, are the last 4 threads we posted on. (The MV Church secretly deleted our last few where a moderator began posting an attack after every post we made until we asked the Holy Admin several times to review it and he locked our account instead.) Recommending a competitor and MV sponsor must be truly offensive shilling and this final post of ours the one that did it:

A 190 cylinder kit would be vastly easier and cheaper. Why not just do that?

http://www.scooterwest.com/item_detail/Malossi-190cc-kit-ET4LX-150/50/

At the end of the day, what would the difference in engine and headache-dollars be?

Or our penultimate post where someone needed a special item from Vietnam, a cheap little basket:

We could probably do one for you. What did you want to put it on?

Or our 3rd to last, where an MV sponsor attacked us out of the blue because we helped a poster asking about our CDI kits:

What does it have to do with me at all, Jim?

Why so intent on destroying civil discussion?

[And in the same thread:]

>>Don't forget to buy local mate (USA)

So you know, I fully agree with that if you have a local shop in your city - always nice to deal firsthand with real people -, I just don't think it matters at all where you order from if you are ordering foreign-made parts over the internet from another city.

Hmm, could that be the money reason again? An MV sponsor ordering people to buy locally while attacking the evil foreigners? (As he is sanctioned to do repeatedly, recently lying to forum readers about bodged scooters that have nothing to do with us.)

And the 4th to last, a week earlier, which sums up our disdain for the dishonest forum tactics in question:

This is what my email this morning is about?

As I said to the poster, we're not interested in forum dramas. Comments reflect upon yourselves and the forum, not us in any way.

Has no one noticed yet that some here act in the exact same manner as the classic scooter nazis (“Talimericans” if you prefer a clever term) on the BBS that attack this forum and its members constantly, and have virtually destroyed all civil, intelligent discussion there? That's why we rarely post except on the LCGB.

I can't fathom even half the tales I read about us on a couple US forums. [...] I'll leave a tiny clique to post, fact-free, how this reply too is somehow rhetoric, excuses, lack of ethics, name-calling, etc., even as they employ those very tools repeatedly. Who needs civility, language and logic when we have the internet?

Anything wrong there? Or did you see for yourself that the ModernVespa Church is trying to brainwash you?

Though clearly never spamming the forum, to those asking why we didn't take out an ad on ModernVespa, we would gladly have done so as we have elsewhere except when we asked we very unprofessionally got no response at all. Anyway, it was made clear from the beginning by the Holy Admin that he believes in Original Sin, such as when we first joined and had to ask several times to review a nasty post saying we use child labor and he complained to us that we had caused it by our mere presence.

Or as the Holy Admin explicitly told us later, one reason he wouldn't do anything about abuses by his Church staff was because we are not a “real” part of the scootering community - thus denying the world map of scooterists we have served over 10 years:

By the way, here is the expanded post that set the Church elders after the free-thinking heretic:

ScootRS are a good supplier, no affiliation. This forum is starting to sound a little like a church here in NZ, "Destiny Church". Is that guy making fun of Jess or is that his real name, Devine????? Is this a cult or is this a real forum??? I was once at a Moony camp years ago and everyone there was real nice too, should I be worried???

Well, just remember that a few Devine insiders at the ModernVespa Church need to control what you think on some subjects, not let you or unbiased discussion decide. So when you enter, kneel down in front of the Holy Admin, ’cause you gonna do some prayin’, boy. “And you better pray good.”

[Update: MV staff continue to misinform people. How can any info there be trusted while this goes on?]