The Facts - Why I was Banned from Squires/Parker Forum – You Be the Judge

Brian Handreck (Red Bigot) tried to register on Mark Squires Forum, but it doesn’t allow the person to post until their registration is approved. His approval was refused because the moderator/site owner thought I was Brian and was trying to register again under an alias.

Things got heated (on both sides) between Brian and Mark, as Brian didn’t like being accused of being me, even if we are friends.

To cut a long story short, Brian was refused permission to post on that site.

At the same time, I was having a bit of a disagreement with Mark in a thread on Australian Wine and their ageing potential. This became a bit heated, but no more than a lot of the threads on his forum. There were certainly no seriously personal attacks.

Basically Mark Squires took the position that Oz reds don’t improve with age, and we discussed it at length in that thread, (which went for pages). I suggested he look at book (quoted page number etc) that supported my position. Squires dismissed it as “irrelevant.” The posts between us continued for sometime and I kept asking him why the comments in the book were “irrelevant.” Mark kept on insisting it was "irrelevant" but avoided answering why. From memory, the thread was locked when it was over 100 posts.

Then, Greg Perrett started a new thread that directly asked Mark why he had not answered the question. That thread went on to cover two pages too. Eventually, something that had been niggling at the back of my mind clarified into a thought. I asked Mark how he had got hold of the book as it had only been recently released in Oz and was not being sold in the US yet. It wasn’t even listed by Amazon at that stage.

Mark was not impressed as he had no answer. His previous wholesale dismissal of the backup professional opinion I had provided, in spite of the fact that he had not read it, left Mark, shall we say, somewhat exposed.

Then later, in another thread someone asked about any good wine database software. I replied in great detail about a fantastic bit of software that could do amazing things and best of all it was free.

However, I then said "Brian may have even offered it to people of this site but...."

And for that I was "suspended" (permanently) from posting and my post was deleted.

Here are a few interesting snippets of email from Mark that I received after the heinous crime of mentioning Brian’s name. I was accused "of picking at scabs.”

And also "It matters that your ego and temper prevent you from obeying the rules of the site. Period."

And the best comment of all "You went off half-cocked with no provocation at all. You had no manners. You acted like a total jackass."

That’s me! A bad tempered jackass, with no manners, that won’t follow rules, (but then I have never met a good tempered jackass with manners, who did follow rules.)

Interestingly enough, these two threads must have really bothered Mark. They occurred late in 2001. In (about) 2003, when I looked at them both threads were completely intact. When I went into them in November 2005, to do a link to them, both threads had been “cleaned up” substantially with much/most of the content deleted. For example, one contributor (Murray Almond) must have had at least 10 posts in one thread alone deleted, just because he agreed with me. Mark rewrote history after two years.

Readers can make up their own mind about this scenario, I have made (almost) no gratuitous comments, just presented the facts.