The Zinn case

Long ago, Zinn (Tony Belding, today a respected wizard in Furscape) was, after a disagreement with Arian, the wizard running SPR space as a "private area", banished from space and subsequently @toaded. This is one of the events that led to the exodus of unci and others from SPR.

In 2001, Zinn once again requested a character from helpstaff, and was on SPR for some time without problems. Then the following mail exchange occurred. By request of Snout, I had to take down his e-mails, I will summarize their contents to retain some coherence. [....] stands for quoted text in the original mail.

• Winged to Zinn and Zinn's provider (2001-10-14 00:29 CST)
  • Zinn to Winged and Zinn's provider (2001-10-14 13:29 CST)
    • Winged to Zinn and Zinn's provider (2001-10-15 09:43 CST)
• Zinn to Snout (2001-10-14 07:48 CST)
  • Snout to Zinn (2001-10-14 09:29 CST): He forwarded it to the other wizards, asking them for opinions/reasons.
  • Snout to Zinn (2001-10-14 13:01 CST): He quoted Arian, who claims that Zinn stole his program code (see below), that Zinn was banished after breaking a no-contact order, and that Zinn was "trespassing" by coming back despite a previous banishment.
    • Zinn to Snout (reply to Arian) (2001-10-15 10:56 CST)
  • Snout to Zinn (2001-10-14 13:02 CST): Apparently quoting Arian again, who, as conditions for Zinn's return, asks for an apology to the staff for evading the @toad, an apology to Alaria and Arian for past disruptions of the space area, and acknowledgement of a permanent no-contact with Arian.
    • Zinn to Snout (reply) (2001-10-15 11:04 CST)
  • Snout to Zinn (2001-10-15 13:37 CST): For peace among the wizards, he now votes against Zinn coming back to SPR.

Note that the original reasons of banishment don't seem to play a role any more - banishment seems to be a justification for itself; no attempt at solving the original conflict is made.

There is the claim of stolen program code. You may compare the two programs by yourself:

• To list Arian's program, log into spr.ctrl-c.liu.se 23 and @list #87139
• To list Zinn's CD player program, see here

Note also that only a very small number of wizards got involved in this - the majority are obviously not interested in this conflict. To me it seems that the issue is mostly driven by the feelings of a small number of wizards against certain players. This shows that, sadly, not much has improved since 1999. The number of wizards might have been reduced, but those who are still there are still acting on their own against those that they don't like.