TurfZone – HarbourBeach
Who would have thought that there could be a nasty side to the game of turf? Yes, one might think that simply exploring town and country taking zones, gathering points and having a jolly good time might be one of the most innocuous, gentle and entirely innocent pastimes you could find, though the likes of train spotting, sand collecting and watching kettles boil, might just come close.
Yes, there are some turfers who have gone over to the Dark Side, though I must say to call them turfers is a disservice to real turfers. One of the most obvious and most heinous of crimes from the Dark Side is the appropriation of someone’s turfname. You might think that such a crime might come from the twisted mind of arch-villain Feathers McGraw, but no, there are sad people out there would seem to derive some twisted pleasure from such activities.
But first, why would you change your turfname in the first place? Well, some turfers like to do that during certain turf events such as when participating in competitions, for example, the TURF Ultimate Region Fight 2025, when members of Team Scotland might add TS to their turfname. PlanetGary would become TSPlanetGary, useful for informing non-team members that they are in the competetion. Another example might be at Christmas. In a recent example turfer Hodge changed his turfname to HoHoHodge, to reflect the theme of Christmas. A witty and worth thing to do.
Unfortunately, this leaves the turfname Hodge open and available for anyone to use. Now, I can understand if a new turfer came along and their actual surname was Hodge. They might use that in all innocence. But in this instance is seems to be a direct case of someone deliberately using the name Hodge simply to be nasty and spiteful, for whatever reason. Thankfully, the real Hodge was able to recover the turfname Hodge with the assistance of the Turf Crew who have access to the database holding all the data concerned with turf. The culprit had their turfname changed to TheFakeHodge much to their annoyance.
I had concerns about changing my own turfname back in 2021 when participating in Scotland vs Skåne turf challenge. My own turfname matches that of this blog and I would not have wanted to lose the turfname, no matter how unlikely that might be. So, in order to prevent the turfname PlanetGary from being stolen, I created a second turf account with a temporary turfname. I then changed PlanetGary to TSPlanetGary and the temp turfname to PlanetGary, thus preventing anyone from using that turfname. After the event it was simple to swap the names back. Mores soon.
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