Before I start:

We're trying something a bit different here. In the past we have always considered moderation decisions to be a private rather than public matter and handled everything in house with no publicly available explanation. Unfortunately because of the number of our efforts to give people multiple chances they often end up spouting a lot of complaints about the site before being removed, and then often go on to repeat those complaints in other online communities, and due to the lack of public information some of these complaints may be believed by outsiders even though they're not really accurate.

This topic is to be kept strictly on point, and at the bottom of the post I'll add some guidelines for what is and isn't acceptable as a response; please read the topic (and especially those guidelines) in full before responding, as off-topic replies may be removed without further notice. We would like to allow the community a fair chance to comment, but if we have to do too much clean-up the topic will be closed.

Remember that in some cases posts may have been hidden from public view, and that behaviour via private message and any other channels of communication are also taken into account, so just looking through a member's posting history may not show you everything that moderation decisions have been based upon.

An open letter to 'Graelig':

Unfortunately this open letter is to explain the reasons we are permanently banning you from the site; you've been quite vocal about the fact that you consider our community and particularly some of our moderation decisions to be unfair, and so we're trying something different by laying it all out publicly for everyone to see.

Since early June this year you have been issued with five separate official warnings via our system, and in addition have also been spoken to informally a number of times about your behaviour. The official warnings issued cite insulting/abusive/loaded language, offensive behaviour, and ignoring moderator instruction.

You have stated on a couple of occasions that you have not insulted other members, and whilst it is true that your wording usually specifically avoids insulting any particular individual your phrasing is often broadly insulting or dismissive of all other members as a whole. To provide one recent specific example, in your topic "your thoughts on the value of profilers and debuggers" you present your own strongly worded view-point and then finish off the post by asking "anyone else feel the same? Or is it only pod people left these days?" The implication that either people agree with your point of view or are group-thinking "pod people" is broadly insulting to those that disagree and is not a productive start to an adult conversation. Your posts are littered with similar examples where you dismiss dissenting opinions as "stupid" or "idiotic".

You have stated that we have punished you for posting unpopular (but supposedly completely truthful) opinions; that is not the case, but rather that you have been warned for the insulting and offensive way in which you word many of these posts. Dissenting opinions are welcome here as long as they are properly presented, and furthermore your repeated suggestions that your posts are to be taken as 100% accurate again does not invite productive conversation or allow for the fact that you are sometimes wrong. It's ok to be wrong occasionally, and you have been demonstrably so in at least a couple of cases.

You have claimed that we are unfairly punishing you whilst allowing others to bully you with impunity, but in order to allow you a fair chance we have removed inflammatory replies from other users in multiple topics (including for example this one), and issued warnings to a number of those users where appropriate. We (the moderators) are not simply stalking your posts looking for any slip-up to punish, but are responding to reports from offended or concerned community members, many of whom have called for you to be removed earlier. Looking through the first few pages of our reporting system I see no less than 25 reports concerning your posts, made by at least 10 different community members, and I can recall numerous reports before those.

On multiple occasions you have brought up off-topic disagreements from previous discussions, as if trying to play martyr rather than actually addressing the posts you are replying to on their merits, and in many cases we have removed these posts so as to avoid having to close otherwise productive discussions and to give you an additional chance to participate constructively.

From our perspective, we have been bending over backwards to give you a fair chance:

• You have been issued with multiple warnings, both formal and informal.
• You have been suspended from the site three times, with the hope that your behaviour would improve.
• You have been reported over and over again by many other members calling for you to be banned but have been allowed to stay in the name of a "fair chance".
• We have removed posts and warned other members for harassing you, and removed some of your own off-topic posts that would otherwise likely have resulted in an earlier ban.
• One of our moderators even self-censored by removing an unseen reply in which they snapped at you unfairly.
• Our community has down-voted you to an abysmal -825 reputation. No doubt some of this is people "jumping on the bandwagon", but you don't get a score that low without genuinely and seriously rubbing a lot of people the wrong way.

Unfortunately, enough is enough -- our moderators are getting weary from giving you an additional chances, and numerous community members who have been long term valuable contributors to the site are growing sick of reporting and responding to your content -- it is obvious your behaviour is not going to change and that you will continue to be disruptive here, so it's time for you to go.

Responding to this post:

Any responses to this post are to be kept strictly on topic, and the subject of this post is the behaviour of the member Graelig and responses from our moderators. For any other subjects (comments of the behaviour of other members, moderation in general, or feedback on the posting of this open letter, etc.) please start a new topic in this forum. If you think there is a systemic problem with moderation please start a new topic and provide specific examples, not just an unsubstantiated complaint like several that have been made off-hand by Graelig.

While you're welcome to comment, this is not a place for "dumping on" Graelig. We still expect the normal site rules to be followed, and insults, bullying, etc. will not be tolerated.

One additional note: I have a very busy weekend planned with my family and may be slow to respond to anything specifically directed to me.

I am actually surprised by this. His reply to What game engine should I use? was actually helpful and on point. I was holding out hope.

We were hoping for a change too after all the effort to give a fair chance, but unfortunately the small number of constructive posts made does not counter-act continued bad anti-social behaviour elsewhere, and this final decision was made in response to yet another reported post and taking the entire history in to account.

You'll actually find a number of quite helpful posts scattered throughout Graelig's account history, and more recently the ratio of good to bad was certainly improving, but unfortunately at this point it's just too little too late.

if you do not mind me asking, what was the post that tipped you over the edge to make this call?

Something that might give you an idea, on The Nexus forums (that also uses IPBoard) they have a subforum where moderators can post. Each time they ban someone (temporarily or permanently), they create a new thread detailing particular user, reasons to ban him, etc. Discussion happens there about the decision.

I mean, its not something it happens regularly but it would be nice to have such public record and it would only involve a new subforum that only admins/mods can post on.