Welcome to the alternative fan site and forum for Big Brother Australia where freedom of expression and imagination are valued. www.behindbigbrother.net (www.bbbau.net) is not a gossip or rumour site. We are first and foremost a forum community. We do not try to rival or compete with the likes of www.behindbigbrother.com (BBBA), who specialise in gathering rumours and gossip about the Big Brother TV show and posting them on their main page.
This page will not be constantly updated with supposed inside source information. It is rather intended to be an introduction to our forums at www.forums.behindbigbrother.net, to help explain its origins and the ideas underpinning the forum and why we think our forum is unique. As our name suggests there is a loose link to BBBA, but we are in no way associated with that site. www.bbbau.net and its yahoo supported forum originated from discontent at BBBA in the way the place was being moderated by a few individuals in favour of a clique.
Rather than be a site and forum which a BBBA member could enjoy and express oneself in, it soon became obvious that the place was moderated mainly by capricious uni and wanna be uni students and those of a similar mentality who didn't have much tolerance for viewpoints which differed very greatly to their own. One either fell into line in the way one expressed oneself, often without too much humour or intelligence, or faced what seemed at times a never ending barrage of infractions for "moronic and useless" posts. In addition to the capricious moderators, there was the long standing clique, who had embedded itself in the place. It was for these few that the moderators did most of their work and in return the clique supported the capriciousness of the moderators, never questioning their decisions and supporting the line often stated by the moderators that we can do what we like here. If you don't like it, move on.
Eventually the advice was taken and www.behindbigbrother.net was born, attempting to take some of the better aspects of BBBA forums and place them into an environment which was more supportive of freedom of expression and tolerance. Although similar in name and in some superficial aspects to BBBA, our forum is obviously different in our commitment to support members who support the principles which www.bbbau.net are established upon. This commitment is extended to a new member or senior member. The important thing is our principles, not whether you have brownie points with a moderator or admin.
www.bbbau.net has been a challenging and educational experience to set up and administer. The powers to be at BBBA have made it very clear they are not pleased with the establishment of www.bbbau.net. One main objection has been the use of the words "behind big brother", a phrase which the head admin and founder of BBBA says he has copyright over. Anybody half familar with copyright law knows it is impossible to copyright a phrase of the English language. Even trade mark rules would make it impossible because it is common to use the word "behind" in the context of going deeper into something. The domain name www.behindbigbrother.net was registered legally.
The next big objection was that the name was being used to confuse newbies. There is not much to say about this accusation except to state to date we have not had one genuine case of confusion arise. We make it clear on this page and in the header of our forums that we are .NET and not .COM. There is also an abundance of references to .COM on the forum to make clear the difference. This page itself makes clear the differences simply by this article.
After that objection there was next big one: that www.bbbau.net was nothing more than a hate site. True enough there was some discontentment being expressed towards BBBA on our forums. There still is. Basically, many members came over to www.bbbau.net to post many things they weren't allowed to post on BBBA and would probably find themselves evicted for. Not abusive things, but rather criticisms of either BBBA itself or some members, particularly those who appeared to enjoy favouritism. Not content with expressing their dissatisfaction on BBBA (a catch 22 situation for them) some moderators and members of the clique joined www.bbbau.net with the sole intention of bringing over much of the hate which they themselves accused the site of suffering from.
Spamming and trolling at .net has proven a constant problem. It's worst incident occurred when four accounts jointly posted pornography all over the forum. At first this was thought to be the work of rogue members of BBBA who had a vendentta against one of the admin at .NET but later revelations by a member of BBBA revealed that BBBA admin had indulged in this type of tactic before, spamming a rival board with pornography. The BBBA member, King01, had strong evidence which suggested that Vibes had involvement in accessing several accounts King01's own forum, accounts which had launched similar porn attacks to the one which .NET suffered. The evidence came through the matching of Vibe's IP address when he accessed these several accounts on the rival forum with the ones which he used on BBBA itself. An inside source at BBBA provided details of Vibe's IP address. The link was therefore made between the accounts on the rival site and Vibes at BBBA.
It is this type of childish mentality which www.bbbau.net tries to escape from, concealed as it is beneath a pretence of standards which do not in fact exist once you become familiar with how the place operates.
Last Season's Final, Commercialism and Bookies
While mentioning the topic of last season's final, perhaps a brief look at what arose from that night may prove helpful to new visitors to our site. On one level the final result was seen by many as justice arrived at by an odd route. Given that Aleisha probably would have won easily except for the cynical ploy of producers to influence the voting; to motivate fans to vote madly in the last few hours, trying to whip their favourite horse past the winning post.
On another level there was a lot of money riding on those horses through the bookmakers. The bookies stood to lose substantially if the long-shot, Zach, came home the winner. A week prior to the final show long odds could be obtained by betting on Zach, odds which many big punters were quick to cease upon. It was fortunate indeed for those holding the bets that Aleisha won a close two-horse race; fortunate indeed for the producers that those holding the bets did not demand an investigation into what occurred; and fortunate also for those who receive revenue from the bookies, such as commercial big brother fan sites. Fan sites which carry advertising for bookies had a conflict of interest when outspoken fans questioned the result on their forums.
Legitimate questions were being asked about what occurred on final night voting. The loudest and most vocal of fans asking those questions about the legitimacy of the result and voting were dealt with by eviction on one fan site which received income from a bookmaker. This was was an example of a site's independence and integrity being compromised by connections with a bookmaker. It would be unfair to suggest that the site in question indulged in attempting to manipulate the result, but there are indicators that it was not interested in pursuing questions fully about the integrity of the result. This was a repression which suited one of their revenue streams.
It was not the first example of censorship on the site's board, particularly in relation to any members questioning the integrity of the sites links to bookmakers and the false advertising which occurs on the site's front page concerning one bookmaker's so called "latest odds", which rarely if ever reflect the truer smaller odds being offered at the actual site of the bookmaker. Previous threads posted at the site raising concerns about the advertising and misleading odds were quickly closed and warnings issued by the moderators not to raise such questions again. Evictions followed shortly thereafter.
It is not hard to see a pattern of compromise at the commercial www.behindbigbrother.com site, where vested interests rule and censorship hangs over every post whether it relates to financially vested interests or topics and humour which certain mods and admins may not appreciate. The often stated principle by mods there is that "we do what we like". It is an oddity that any fan site which prides itself on going behind big brother should be compromised by its willingness to censor and repress discussion. As far as we can see it is just another enterprise grown ugly by commercial contamination and the ever present human tendency to control and repress.
Like the TV networks, commercialism corrupts independence of expression. Behind Big Brother .NET is a non-commercial fan site. It will always remain as such. It is not .COM, but .NET. - an important and obvious distinction which has far reaching implications for the nature of the site when compared to alternatives. This is a distinction we happily seek to underline to avoid any suggestion of confusion. Behind Big Brother .NET values freedom of expression. Its forums have a number of innovative features to help ensure the integrity of the site is maintained. These features are unique in terms of applying principles of freedom of expression to a forum environment, the relevance of which we believe have just as much application on a forum as society in general.
