Unfortunately, Matthew is correct, and it seems that Ryan Farmer is the idiot that signed a few of us up to about 200 mailing lists this morning. Not only do I trust Matthew's analysis (and was watching him go through the various steps on IRC as it happened), but then there were two other bits.

Ryan refused to approve two of my comments I made on his latest blog entry (more than happy to screenshot this). He claimed he too had been spammed, and had to abandon his email address of a few years. Even if you ignore the length of the text blanked out in the title bar not even remotely matching the length of his personal email address, there were only 131 messages in the inbox, of which 127 were unread, and no others but spam visible. He claimed they were archived; I offered to publicly apologise if he'd do a quick screencast showing him logging into that account and showing some messages from the archive to prove the point. Unfortunately he didn't bother approving these comments. (Incidentally, if you had to 'abandon' an email address due to an avalance of newsletters, et al, which took an hour or two to fully unsubscribe from, would you still bother blacking out the address everywhere?)

As per his standard 'insult everyone with random images from the internet and YouTube videos, then wildly claim conspiracies against him' policy, he went on to claim Matthew was conspiring against him, but given the choice between Matthew conspiring and severely irritating a few of his friends in the process, and some scorned 16-year old continuing his track record of acting like an irrational, immature idiot, I know which one I'd pick.

It takes some skill to be banned from all the Ubuntu IRC channels and the Ubuntu forums both, but I guess this morning showed that was completely justified. Apologies to everyone waiting on the announcement of sponsorship for XDS, as well as hotels, but unfortunately some people just can't conceive of having better things to do than acting like chavs. Hopefully IzanbardPrince/TheAlmightyCthulu/etc goes back to impersonating Kevin Carmony, flaming the bejesus out of companies using BIOSes which trip Linux bugs, and other, equally productive, uses of his time.