On Encyclopedia Dramatica (archive for article on Rome Viharo), I came across a mention of a Reddit discussion.
The extent Rome has been harassed is debatable since most of his website deals with allegations that cannot be proven, but Oliver is known to have created an attack blog on him and has used over 9,000 sockpuppets on reddit to post about Viharo.
(9000 seems very unlikely to me, that’s ED dramatization. However, he or his brother have created very many. They do this extensively where blocked, but they also do it to make it more difficult to track activity, on RationalWiki, they even abandon admin accounts; their accounts there are readily given the privilege, or at least that was the case until recently, when Oliver accounts have experienced some blowback.))
More accurately, Viharo reports his experience and conclusions, and does not necessarily provide evidence, which is a lot more work and can damage readability. It’s a blog, and blog posts are for opinion. I learned to use pages in a hierarchical page structure for collected evidence, and I often collect a lot of evidence before writing posts.
His allegations may over-reach, or not. “Cannot be proven” is obviously prejudgment, and is what Oliver says. Oliver wrote the ED article, as Kiwi Pyre (but it could be Darryl).
Oliver does create attack blogs, very clearly. He announced to me, using his known email address, that he was creating one on Emil Kirkegaard, and he did. (archive)
The Oliver Rome Viharo attack blog converts a description of modestly sophisticated but normal male sexuality into “perverted.” This is common for Oliver, an anti-natalist, who considers having children immoral and disgusting. (As a parent and midwife, it can definitely be messy! Blood and body fluids all over the place, sometimes! Ah, life.)
It has a link to an archive, but the source wasn’t readily findable so I could not determine if there was more in context. That Smith believed the quotation was proof of “perverted” sexuality simply shows how socially isolated he is. It was not a “fantasy,” it was a report of plausible experience. It was not necessarily “promiscuous.”
The Reddit link led to a collection of removed and deleted posts, some kind of archive on ceddit, for the rationalwiki subreddit, only the original post (“removed” but visible) and the reply by FuzzyCatPotato, a moderator (and an RW Board member) are readable. So … often these discussions have been archived. First, the full discussion as it stands. (archive copy), and a copy made 6 Aug 2016 08:44:43 UTC showing 8 of 11 comments. The RW mods (David Gerard and FuzzyCatPotato) are clearly not interested in allowing anything that smells like criticism of RW. The original post there was simply a personal report and question, not hostile. A question was asked and Rome Viharo (openly 23canaries) answered. On RW, his comments on reddit were called “trolling.”
Here are the other three comments. The first by “LaraCroftFan,” a classic Oliver sockname, was dated August 8, 2016, and referred to a comment on WikipediaSucks “a month ago.” (Much of the Smith commentary can be understood by recognizing that, at that point, it was not recognized that the anti-paranormal editing on Wikipedia was Darryl L. Smith, not Oliver D. Smith, but both were tagged on Wikipedia as “Anglo Pyramidologist,” which was Oliver. Hence, by interest, Dan Skeptic (later Goblin Face) were indeed not Oliver, he wasn’t lying about that, but he was not telling the whole truth.
Rome Viharo was, in fact, harassed on Wikipedia (that’s a long story). Then, Oliver justifies the creation of the RW attacks on Viharo as simply responding to Rome’s “harassment,” i.e., writing about what happened to him and what he came to think was behind it. Vzaak — later Manul — did, in fact, “out” Viharo; as I documented elsewhere, Viharo made an accidental edit that revealed his name and immediately blanked that. This is called “difficult to imagine” on RationalWiki, but the very rapid removal is evidence that it was unintentional. Ballyhooing an unintentional revelation is “outing” and a privacy violation on Wikipedia, but Viharo was naive at the time and did not know he could have it revision-deleted by privately emailing any administrator. Instead he complained and accused vzaak of a policy violation — which was a noob way of handling it, and which, of course, made it even more visible.
But for our purposes, he was indeed harassed, as anyone showing up to challenge the faction’s dominance of the topics is likely to face.
As to WikipediaSucks, that was not the present WikipediaSucks forum. It was a Proboards forum, see this complaint from UlyssesAxe (another obvious Oliver sockname). This led me to this archive for the old WS. The page Oliver actually linked to was the next page.
and that links back to archive of reddit contributions for Oceanus0 .. another obvious Oliver sock, who admits using RationalWiki to create google prominence for attack, responding to Michaeldsuarez, apparently:
I’ll be sure to cover your abuse on that forum as well Michael. I can now cover the whole thing at Rationalwiki I have permission. Yes, and that will become no.1 google search for the forum. People will be laughing at it – totally discredited.
These comments by Oliver are filled with straw man arguments, for example:
While I am gaining support from credible people e.g. Tim Farley and William M. Connolley a PhD scientist – Viharo can only find trolls and crackpots. Below is William M. Connolley’s article calling Viharo a troll. Connolley also can see Viharo is a transparent liar for example Viharo claims “Goblin Face” or “Manul” outed his identity when he posted his own name at Wikipedia. No one outed him but himself.
This is creating many leads to follow, too many to describe now.
Both Manul and, later, Dan Skeptic/Goblin Face outed Viharo, based on the accidental edit by Viharo. That was clearly outing, because it was obviously an unintentional revelation (and might even have been misleading, though it wasn’t. i.e., Viharo accidentally revealed his name, and immediately blanked it. Waving the name about was then a privacy violation. I have not yet studied what happened next, but Manul clearly was harassing Viharo over this when he, as vzaak, first pointed it out. The link to Connolley’s blog: https://archive.is/lsA1n. It looks like Connolley took that blog post down. Looks like every post for some years disappeared. Present blog archive display shows 2007 (1) and 2017 (31), whereas the archive.is page shows apparently high activity in the missing years. There are many posts available on archive.is.
Looking for the WikipediaSucks discussion, it would have been roughly July 1, 2016. I found the discussion, it began with a post by archaic, June 24, 2016. referring to a Talk page post from RationalWiki. That link was dead. But from the signature, I was able to find that this post (June 19, 2016) was repeated on four user talk pages. I suspect impersonation of Rome Viharo. In the pattern I have seen, text from the target is used for vandalism. I have not found an original text, though, so not conclusive yet.
“archaic” was immediately outed as Oliver D. Smith. It’s a remarkable discussion. It is more complete on archive.is. page 1 page 2 page 3.