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  • Report:  #1255745

Complaint Review: RPHaven - Internet

Reported By:
BenthicGenerator - Other, USA
Submitted:
Updated:

RPHaven
Internet, USA
Phone:
+1.3216629006
Web:
rphaven.com
Categories:
Tell us has your experience with this business or person been good? What's this?

I am posting this Ripoff Report because I have really no other way to get word out on the questionable practices on this site, and the lack of any ethics or professionality of the site owner, Zach Sprague, aka. Sadako.

RPHaven is a text-based roleplaying site that has an option to buy a 'group' (these no longer function as forums) in order to 'own' a permanent chat room. There is a lot of vety sexual roleplay that happens on this site, and there are very few precautions taken to keep minors off the site. Many of the character profiles have 'kinks' listed that include things like 'ageplay', which is a kink for sexual activity with children. I will not post links to the material in question, because it is of dubious legality, but you will find it if you go to rphaven.com and look for the profiles pf 'Little Bobby' and 'Ageplay Princess'. They have been reported to the Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and so far they have been able to do nothing about this site. It would be all too easy for a child predator to get on the site and find a minor to groom. RPH relies on peer reporting to 'out' minors. This is ineffective, because people will not report friends. I personally know of several minors that use the site. When they are reported, they just make new names and return.

The other issue at hand is the absolutely atrocious behavior of the site owner, Zach Sprague. He insults and berates individual members with system-wide messages and puts up admin messages visible at sign-on thatnot only call out individual members, but insult and deride the member base as a whole. In one message, he threatened to stop doing bug fixes and maintenance entirely becasue people were angry with him over an unannounced outage period. Several features of the site—things people pay to be able to use—have also been disabled. One could once put up a character avatar, and Groups used to function as forums, so people could put roleplay logs up and keep track of character stat sheets. He took all of this away, citing some form of security leak. With the rest of his behavior and the fact that these features have been gone for over a year, this is not likely to be the case. Also, he has for months been trying to start two other projects, L.E.W.D. and Creightr. He has been berating the member base of RPH to support these other two projects, and when they don't wish to do so, he states that the reason the avatars and groups are not fixed is because 'you don't care enough to support L.E.W.D and Creightr, so I don't care enough about RPH to give the features back', or words to that effect. Sprague clearly has no concept of what it means to work with the public.

On top of all of this, the site is unstable and buggy. His claims about its security are entirely valid; it is run on only one server, and any hacker worth the name could go in and destroy it, or steal the member names and passwords. The climate of the site has become increasingly hostile, with users all too willing to verbally abuse each other. This problem is most evident on the so-called 'help' board. It is to be noted that Sprague has the 'Donate' option turned off and its attached PayPal is unable to accept payments. This could indicate anything from another fit of pique on Sadako's part to an intent to suddenly close RPH down entirely.

The site needs to go. But it would be better if it were taken down under honest and honorable conditions, not a tantrum by its owner that leaves people unable to stay in touch with long-term roleplaying partners.



4 Updates & Rebuttals

More information

#2Author of original report

Thu, February 04, 2016

http://www.bizapedia.com/people/FLORIDA/ORLANDO/ZACHARY-SPRAGUE.html


Caster

Fayetteville,
Arkansas,
USA
It's worse than it sounds, and doesn't stop there.

#3General Comment

Sun, January 17, 2016

Zach, owner of RPH under the username of Sadako, has managed to take what was a good concept, and ruined it beyond repair. No one imagined that this was the way it was going to turn out when he took over the site some years ago, and no one ever imagined he'd start leaving the same taste in people's mouths as the owner of another well know roleplaying site, RolePlayChat.

From a distant perspective, it's immediately clear to the viewer that Zach has issues, not only with maintaining a site within a realm of professionalism, but also within the realm of morality. On the latter, for example, he has numerous profiles in which characters under the legal age of consent (within the United States) are seen in these profiles indulging in things of a sexual nature. These profiles are, also, geared towards sexual encounters. Fictional or not, people have been labeled pedophiles before for this very thing, taken to court on those grounds, and beaten. And I, for one, believe he should see his day in court for that very matter, soon.

As if that was not enough, he disregards the rules of his own site to carry out grudges, and do the will of people who've won him over. At this very moment in time, a married woman (who also cheats on her husband) brags to her friends about how he's obsessed with her. And given that he attacks anyone she has issue with, I don't disbelieve her.

While, yes, it is true that it is his site and he can do with it as he pleases, the fact that he is so easily swayed by a woman who is clearly using him to get her way is a bit, shall we say, frightening for the user-base?

Furthermore, he breaches even more morality, and possibly even legality, with the fact that he pokes at people's personal instant messages without their knowledge or consent. Yes, Zach, this will come back to haunt you.

Moving on, his site once offered a decent service. This was so, until he started stealing code without crediting the owners, breaking services and functions for 'security purposes' (because he cannot admit that he's just really shoddy at coding), and trying to force down the throats of RPH users the service of a game he 'works' on in his free time(That very game is an open-sourced game that he refuses to accredit the original makers for), and circumvents letting his site be considered a business by calling payments 'donations'.

How right does this seem to you, reader, that you must donate for credits on this site to expand your number of character slots, use permanent statuses, more profile coding options, and create an official group? Does that even sound remotely like donating? Because it sounds like 'paid services' to everyone else. Paid services which are not even remotely guaranteed to work.

Now, he's stripped his site of the easiest methods to donate, and now forces people to donate to his open-sourced game (which again, he gives no credit to the original makers for) to get credits on-site.

Take from that what you will- the service is a ripoff, on both a moral and legal scale.


Baseless?

#4Author of original report

Sun, January 17, 2016

No, actually, it's not. I note that you do not one thing other than go 'Nuh-h!' to any of the above allegations. I also note that not one thing has happened to improve the climate on the site or make it proof against the very violations that we both know take place on the daily.

It's going to catch up to you. Someone is going to do something severely illegal and be caught for it. There are also ample rumors of things you yourself have done and been involved in, Zach. This has absolutely zero to do with any ill will towards being banned; I could care less, since your site is a cesspit of really disgusting activity. I have no intent of being caught up in whatever happens when the place comes down, so all I am doing is doing the right thing and warning people to steer clear. 

Peer reporting as you do it isn't enough, especially when a ban can be easily and repeatedly circumvented by any minors you ban, even if they don't use a Virtual Private Network. I know this is possible, because there are multiple people who have done it and told me about it.

When the site dies and you go down with it, it will be good riddance to bad garbage.


Zach

Orlando,
Florida,
USA
Sounds like baseless slander, doesn't it? Because it is

#5REBUTTAL Individual responds

Sat, January 16, 2016

I mean, I shouldn't really need a rebuttle to this because when you read it you can clearly tell it's just some crazy person making up things and going off a tangent.But, there you go.

This "reporter" is just someone that's mad that they got banned from the site for constantly harrassing people and causing drama.

I could respond to the lies here, but it's much easier to say that every single thing is a lie, which it is. There is not even a single  truthful sentence in the entire thing, at best a few that are lies made from half truths.

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