for those of you who don’t want to read the long thread about this, I’m posting this closed sticky thread to provide information.
We normally don’t post reasons for banning, out of respect for the privacy of the banee (female: banshee?). In this case, a nine-page thread sprung up within 24 hours with many people going in very wrong directions. That thread was closed because it had degenerated into political name-calling.
However, since that all happened within 24-hours on a U.S.-holiday weekend, I am posting an explanation here as a sticky, basically quoting what I said in that thread so that folks don’t have to wallow through the whole freakin’ thing.
Banning december has nothing to do with his political stance. It has nothing to do with what he said, but with how he said it.
He had a long consistent history of a dubious behavior pattern: namely, posting quotes to provoke responses, when the quotes are taken out of context, misconstrued, referring to a different topic, out of time-sequence, mis-attributed, etc. The most recent offenses were egregious, but only the latest in a long, long list. These were the last straws that overflowed the cup (to mix a couple metaphors.)
It’s perfectly OK to post a provocative quote to get a discussion or debate rolling. What’s not OK is when those quotes are taken out of context, distorted, misattributed, etc. Don’t misunderstand: anyone might get a quote wrong upon occasion. But when we have a consistent, repeated pattern many many times over many many months, we have to conclude that this is trolling. Classic trolling: dropping a shocking or extreme (usually false) comment solely for the purpose of generating attention.
The mods have debated his behavior for a long, long time. Most mods saw it as trolling, a few saw it as a permissible (if annoying) debating technique. However, the more the behavior was repeated, the more it became viewed by the mods as trolling and not debating.
december was warned about this behavior back in May 2003, explicitly, and he acknowledged the warning. He was told that there would not be another warning. We’ve been extremely lenient with him. But now he’s been back at it again, over the last several weeks, and enough was enough.
The last couple of posts, that were clearly deliberate distortions (there’s no arguing that he was merely ignorant or gullible), put us over the top. The decision to ban was unanimous amongst the mods.
So, in short, he was banned for a behavior pattern that was indistinguishable from trolling. If it walks like a troll, talks like a troll, quacks like a troll, then it’s a troll.