OK, he was annoying and had piled up several warnings for personal insults… and then a little checking revealed he was a retuning troll/sock, who has been here several times under different names.
Consequently, he’s been banned.
Most of his posts are being “disappeared.” Our normal policy with trolls and returners (“socks”) is to move their posts out of sight. The reason we do this is to discourage them. If they think that all their posts will remain visible, then there’s no reason not to come trolling again. If they see that all their work vanishes into smoke, then we hope that they will see that it’s futile effort.
This approach does cause some hiccoughs in the fabric of reality, we know. That’s a downside, and we just gotta live with it. We think those minor hiccoughs are a reasonable price to pay for discourging those people and getting them out of our lives.
This approach also means that some entire threads have vanished, because the offender started them. Again, that’s too bad, sometimes jerks can start interesting thread. If you see a thread that you thought was interesting, and it’s not around any more, you can (a) start it up again on your own, or (b) email me, I can see whether it’s possible to eliminate the first post and still have the thread make sense.
Please, no discussion or debate about the specifics here. Trolls love to be talked about, they love the publicity and attention, that’s what trolling is all about. If you want to discuss the policy on removal of posts from socks, please sart a thread in the Pit.
Thanks for your understanding.