It's not hard to get mad when Sam is continually left to run around and suck his own dick. You said so yourself, I'm not the first person to get mad and complain about him here.
What else are people from CoG expected to do? They can't complain or point out the fact that he needs to put his thread back in his pants, or else they get flagged and their comment deleted. And that's for something as simple as a damn thread. You've seen what happens when threads or members get worse, it takes months or weeks to actually get anything done.
A light-touch isn't enough, it's just enabling.

How dare you.

I may be a piece of trash, but that doesn't mean you have to smear my good name by claiming I'm from Alabama.

But trashbag is being a cowardly little bitch and I don't approve of those types either.

Behold, the cowardly little bitch has returned.

Nah, Sammy is a self absorbed cunt and shouldn't be pandered to. I don't know/care what their actual rules are, they should just recognize his attention whoring for what it is and shut it down. Mods have to waste time closing every thread he makes and then he just does it again.

Thing is, we're in complete agreement here. If Sam can't be banned, fine, whatever, but that doesn't mean he can't be reigned in. I don't remember him being this bad and attention-whorey when I first joined, minus him having his own damn personal thread.

I'm not a mediocre writer who thinks Sam is Chtulu's gift to interactive fiction so I wasn't invited to the discord, but thanks for the vote of confidence! I always knew I was a piece of trash.

I guess if someone else wanted to put up an un-demoed WIP thread and had a bunch of people who wanted to talk about it, I'd be ok with it too.

Isn't that the entire reason there's an interest check thread to begin with? Before the megathread people would still talk about the interest check in question in their respective thread, working through their ideas aloud with commenters. Many interest checks would even be promoted to WIPs if they got a half-assed demo before bring unceremoniously abandoned. There wasn't really a dearth of discussion so much as a dearth of followthrough, which I think is emblematic of Sam's way of creating new WIPs.

So why does he get special treatment?

But what about having a ton of WIPs that you never finish? I know focusing of a few projects at once can help keep from burning out, but he's also had WIPs for years now that he's always mentioning but never actually writes or finishes.

Just looking through his feed shows at least five games he started and abandoned, at least three of whixh he still says he's actively writing despite not updating anything for close to a year or more. That's some middle school fanfic author level of denial.

I think Sam here is the opposite problem that you're describing: a serial WIP abandoner. He puts in a little bit of efforr then drops it like the hot potato when his next idea grips him, but still continues pointing to his unfinished work as proof of his writing ability when really all it demonstrates is that he has a bad habit of following through.

And before you say it, no I don't think this is similar to other authors losing interest in a game for a few years before coming baxk with something they really like with renewed energy because this guy does it every couple of months, but instead of focusing all his attention like most WIP writers do, he just posts his demo, updates it a few times, then never followw through with it. I think MMM and NNN (terrible names by the way) are the only games he's kept up with, and even NNN he hasn't mentioned in a couple of months...

I know a few people did bring this up to Eiwynn and Gower (the only two active mods) but evidently being a fast writer with a bunch of WIP means being given special treatment.

I guess there's also no accounting for taste...