Once up a time there was a man named Jimbo King who liked American
football more then anything else in the world. He liked it so much
that he created a town for him and anybody else who loved football. He
named the town "Maddenville" and it was open to anybody who liked to
play football, watch football, or even just talk about football.

So people started to move into the town and leagues and teams were
formed for people of all ages. For playing the game, Jimbo set a few
basic rules as "pillar rules" such as "the game will be played on a
field of 100 yards with a regulation football, the games will be
divided into 4 quarters of 15 minutes, 7 points for a touchdown, 3
points for a field goal, and a few others. Only the minimum needed to
keep the game "football". All the other rules were decided by
consensus.

For the first few years everything worked fine. One league or another
had games everyday and the townspeople set up websites, forums, and
blogs for talking about the games and to agree upon the rules.
Sometimes there were disagreements over rules like how many downs the
offence had to move 10 yards or the definition of a forward pass but
all these were eventually settled by consensus and there was joy in
Maddenville.

One day a stranger named "Casey" moved into town who had some new
ideas about how to play football. He thought it should be played on a
diamond shaped field with teams of 9 players who would take turns
hitting a little white ball with a wooden bat and try to run around
the bases to score. He presented his ideas in the forums and the other
townspeople politely told him that what he was proposing was not
"football" and therefore would violate the pillar rules. However,
Casey was a very stubborn man and wouldn't take "no" for an answer so
he kept on proposing his ideas in the forums.

At first the townspeople remained civil about this and tried their
best to convince Casey that his game wasn't "football" but he kept on
insisting that the game should be played his way. He would claim that
many other townspeople agreed with him and supported him in email but
were afraid to speak up because they didn't want to be banished by the
"footcabal" which he claimed was a group consisting of Jimbo King and
a few of his "cronies".

His next move was to create a "cardboard consensus". He made cardboard
figures of people and set them up at the fields during the games. They
all had looping tape players that made them chant "BAT AND BALL" over
and over again. He then created blogs and forum accounts for all his
cardboard figures and had them all post support for his ideas.
However, this all failed to convince the townspeople that he had a
consensus and he eventually was banished after he was caught with a
bulldozer trying to plow diamonds into the football fields.

However, the banishment only enraged Casey and he vowed revenge on the
town. First he set up a website called "Maddenville Review" and he
used this to attack Jimbo King and many other townspeople. Then other
strangers started to show up with their own ideas on how to play
football. One claimed that football should be played on an indoor
court with teams of 5 trying to throw a big brown ball into a high
netted hoop. Another claimed that football should be played by trying
to kick a big white ball into a rectangular net because that's how the
rest of the world plays it. All these strangers had their own
"cardboard consensus" and bulldozers and it got to the point that the
townspeople were spending more and more time arguing with the
newcomers and their cardboard figures and repairing the damage done
with their bulldozers and less time playing football. No longer was
there joy in Maddenville.

Maddenville was in crisis. People with bizarre views of what
constituted "football" were disrupting it. Some of the town's
leaders decided that what was needed was to Get Tough on the trolls,
vandals, and disrupters. A number of people were banned. Many of
the banned people, along with others who were critical for some
reason or other of the concept of Maddenville, the way Maddenville
was being run, or the game of American football itself, started
congregating on a hilltop near enough to Maddenville to get a good
look at what was happening there, but across the county line so that
the authorities of Maddenville had no jurisdiction over them. They
named their new settlement "Maddenvile Review Village", and soon it
grew into a thriving settlement, though still much smaller than
Maddenville itself. From there, residents used telescopes and
binoculars to monitor the goings-on at Maddenville, as well as
getting reports by phone, paper mail, and in person by visitors from
Maddenville, not to mention watching and listening to the TV and
radio stations originating in Maddenville. Just like the obsession
of Maddenville was football, the obsession of Maddenville Review
Village was Maddenville.

For a while the two settlements coexisted without very much strife;
many in Maddenville were glad that some of the more disruptive people
had left (whether voluntarily or by being exiled forcibly), and chose
simply to ignore the activities of the village of critics and go on
with their own passion for football. However, there were a few in
Maddenville whose feelings were hurt by the mean things Maddenville
Review Village was saying about them. They would send banned people
to sneak into Maddenville at night and post notices on the bulletin
board in the town square, sometimes containing personal attacks on
citizens of Maddenville, or revealing embarrassing personal
information about them. Maddenville's constables would rip them down
as soon as they saw them, but sometimes ill feelings resulted from
their being seen at all. A growing sentiment developed among some of
the leaders of Maddenville that more needed to be done than simply
passively ignoring them.

Matters soon came to a head when a leader who had been the subject of
particularly nasty attacks from the Review Village noticed the
distressing fact that Maddenville Review Village was listed in the
atlas and gazetteer in the Maddenville Public Library. This atlas
was the pride and joy of the town librarian and the centerpiece of
the library's collection, as the librarian supplemented her love of
football with a love of geography nearly as great. The atlas was
kept in a set of three-ring binders so that pages could be updated as
needed, in order to keep it accurate up to the minute. In a recent
update, MRV had been added, as the publishers of the atlas decided
that it was sufficiently notable for inclusion along with the many
other cities, towns, villages, and hamlets included there.

This would simply not do, according to the town leader. MRV was a
group of evil, banned trolls, and should not be given the recognition
of inclusion in any reference work in Maddenville, in his opinion.
Since Maddenville had a tradition to "Be Bold", he went into the
library with a tube of White-Out and obliterated MRV from the map.
The librarian wasn't very happy with this, but didn't vocally object
because she didn't much like MRV anyway, and didn't want to be seen
by the townspeople as supporting that group of trolls and harassers.

"Casey" in American culture, is and old fashioned name - also related to the song 'and the band played on', and has been associated with various sports figures, esp. in the 1950s.

More specifically, Casey is an arbitrary, dummy for all the bad behavior on WP.

Madden refers to John Madden, a famous American football coach. These are dummy names.

After much infighting, and several further attempts to enforce the
BADTOWNS proposal (such as against a town of movie makers and a town
of science fiction writers and editors which happened to be the
originating places of critiques of somebody in Maddenville that
injured the target's tender sensibilities), the proposal was
universally regarded as having been defeated, and even its most
fervent proponents stopped pushing for it (but only after floating
some more failed proposals such as one to send a traveling circus to
invade towns they disliked and flood their streets with clowns).
However, all was still not peaceful in Maddenville.

The people at Maddenville Review Village continued to attempt to
disrupt Maddenville. Most of them spent most of their time at
harmless pursuits, just sitting around their own village blowing off
steam by spouting about how Maddenville is evil and must be
destroyed, and that somebody is very soon going to sue it into
oblivion, or Congress will ban American football in favor of more
civilized sports like soccer, or other preposterous theories.
However, some of them continued to attempt to impose themselves on
Maddenville, going into disguise and sneaking into the town to post
their manifestos on the bulletin boards and other annoyances. So,
once again the officials decided it was time to Get Tough.

Soon, a group of highly-ranked citizens started devoting most of
their efforts to seeking out and eliminating all traces of the banned
former citizens. Soon, anybody posting anything to the bulletin
board that bore any resemblance to the ideas of any of the banned
people was likely to get in trouble himself. For instance, somebody
once suggested that other sports had some good ideas about how to
organize their playoff system and how to break ties in the league
standings, and they might stand consideration for Maddenville
football leagues; this was roundly shouted down as an idea that had
been raised by a banned user as part of his insidious proposal to
transform football into something entirely different, and the person
making the current proposal was insinuated as being a likely
confederate of this banned user and barely escaped being banned
himself. He remains distrusted by the town leadership to this day,
and so are the other citizens who spoke up in his behalf and
prevented his banning.

More bannings followed, and "newbies" entering the town were likely
to get bitten if they transgressed any of a number of codes of
behavior designed to avoid all taint of the banned people. The
overall attitude of the people gradually deteriorated, and somebody
even posted a humorous statement to the bulletin board to the effect
that "Floggings will continue until morale improves", but it was
swiftly removed by constables who disliked anything humorous as
detracting from the seriousness of the situation. Anybody who
objected to the atmosphere was informed that it was all the fault of
the evil MRV trolls, and if they tried to claim that the Maddenville
constables bore any responsibility, they were roundly attacked,
referred to as likely to be in league with the trolls themselves, and
told to quit wasting time on politics and go play football.
Ironically, the people who said this usually had not played any
football themselves in a long time, and weren't even watching very
much football as they were devoting all their time and energy to
pursuing banned people, banning more people, warning the rest of the
public to keep them in line, and writing essays defending their
attitude. The only reason any football continued to be played was
that there was some influx of newcomers who were actually interested
in the sport, although this influx was much smaller than it had been
in days gone by.

Some people became concerned that there was a double standard.
Certain well-connected people like the star quarterback and a well-
liked sportswriter had a blank check to insult anybody else they
wanted (calling them a "MRV troll" was a popular insult, even if the
person targeted had no actual connection with the other village),
while less-well-connected folks were held strictly to a policy
against saying anything nasty. In a debate about whether it was
desirable to go for it on fourth down at the 50 yard line or punt,
the advocate of punting was found to be in league with a banned
former player and was banned himself, and thus it was decreed that
all teams must go for it on fourth down in such a situation or else
be judged as also in league with the banned user. This cramped the
strategy of games, but nobody dared to object.

What will become of Maddenville? It's up to its citizens now!

From then on, people looking in the atlas at the library couldn't
help notice that something had been censored from it, and this
actually increased the attention paid to MRV, including by people who
hadn't even heard of the place before this. Once their curiosity had
been piqued, it wasn't very hard for them to find it, since it was in
other sources such as Google Maps which were outside the control of
the town leaders. At any rate, many of the town's leading citizens,
including the ones most fervently opposed to MRV, spent much time
looking up at its hilltop with their own telescopes and binoculars in
order to keep an eye on what those evil trolls were up to. However,
they still didn't want anybody else finding the place; they could be
trusted to look at it themselves, for good motives of helping to
protect Maddenville from it, but if others find it they might be
manipulated by the evil trolls, which wouldn't be good.

While debate was breaking out over whether the blanking of the atlas
entry was justified, a citizen wrote an essay called "BADTOWNS" and
posted it to the bulletin board in the town square. It called for a
ban on referring, pointing, or giving directions to any town,
village, or hamlet that was engaged in personal attacks on any
citizen of Maddenville. It was originally designated as merely an
essay, but some people attempted to move it from the bulletin board
into the law books in the town courthouse so it could be enforced as
law, despite it not actually having been voted into effect by the
legislature or by a referendum of the citizens. Others tried to move
it to the historical archives along with other failed proposals.
Somebody even grabbed it and fed it into a paper shredder, but
another person painstakingly taped it back together so that it
remained on the bulletin board. Despite not being made into law,
some tried to enforce it nevertheless, including on people who were
trying to discuss the proposal itself and feeling the need to refer
to specific things about MRV and other towns that might be covered by
the proposal. Some people trying to make such mentions in their
speeches and bulletin board postings about the proposal were given
warnings, and one who persisted after such a warning was forced to
spend the night in the town jail. This tended to chill discussion
afterward.

Proponents of the BADTOWNS policy claimed that it was actually
already law, regardless of the status of the current proposal, due to
an earlier decision of the Maddenville Superior Court. This decision
was regarding another town called SportsDramaVille, which was settled
by comedians with a very tasteless sense of humor. Their main
product was a set of trading cards with grotesque caricatures of
various figures in sports including players, coaches, team and league
officials, and even some prominent fans. The cards also had
scurrilous gossip about the people on them, including false and
defamatory information, true and privacy-invading information, and
nasty personal attacks. Some prominent Maddenville citizens were
included, but some people from Maddenville Review Village also were,
as well as people from other places and other sports of little
interest here. The court decision ultimately banned those trading
cards, and anything else connected with SportsDramaVille. Some felt
this was an overreaching decision going beyond the proper
jurisdiction of the court, and was possibly unconstitutional, but few
wanted to object very strongly because of the overwhelming view that
SDV and its cards were vile things of no use to the serious pursuit
of football. Some thought that the actions of a Maddenville
constable soon after the decision, to go and rummage through the
drawers of the local sports card shop to find and destroy all of the
offending cards even in the dusty, musty backstock that was seldom
even looked at, were unnecessary, however. This decision was now
being used as a precedent to support larger bans on references to
BADTOWNS.

The next controversy came when a scandal broke out that some of the
football players in Maddenville were using illegal performance
enhancing substances, and were lying about it and cheating on their
drug tests. This got extensively written up in the national press,
and resulted in some players being suspended or expelled from their
teams. Embarrassingly, the scandal had been uncovered and publicized
by the people at Maddenville Review Village, as part of their ongoing
attempt to cast disrepute on Maddenville. When the local newspaper,
the Maddenville Goalpost, wrote about the scandal, they included a
line mentioning the involvement of MRV in it. This upset a town
leader so much that he went around town early in the morning
gathering up all the papers before anybody else woke up and read
them, burning those papers, and printing a new edition without the
offending mention. The paper's reporter and editor didn't much care
for this, just like the librarian earlier, but also didn't want to be
seen as MRV sympathizers.