You’re not kidding.
I’m not going to say he was a super valuable poster, but I really can’t see a single thing in any of the recent Warnings that broke any sort of rule. This banning is, to use a technical term, bullshit.
Yeah, seems pretty straight-forward to me. Not much point in Moderator instructions if you can break them four times in two months and not get banned.
If someone keeps getting warned and not banned there would be a thread asking why he hasn’t been banned. He was already one of the most frequently pitted.
Iirc he has an extensive internet foot print and has worn out his welcome on quite a few other cites. But he has plenty of other places he is spreading the word.
I agree, but I confess that (apart from the one about the blog link) I’m finding it difficult to understand what he was being warned for. Of course, there may be context that I’m missing, and if that context renders his remarks insulting then I stand corrected, but it reads as if he’s being warned for witnessing poorly.
If he’s done the blog link thing before, then certainly that warrants discipline, and I’ll defer to the mods’ judgment as to whether banning is appropriate.
Whats the old saying? “Equity is the length of the Chancellor’s cloak”. In other words, this is a private forum moderated by private individuals who are not constrained by anything greater than their whims or at best interpretation of already (by their nature) arbitrary rules. This is not a Court of law.
You don’t like it, leave.
Guys, remember. Dex cited personal insults. That’s what we have to work with here, not things about his blog or anything else. And that just doesn’t track.
What I see is two warnings against hijacking the thread to be about religion, one for linking to his blog (as he was warned not to) and one for appearing to present an argument in bad faith (which is apparently a warnable offense now–GD’s going to get a lot emptier soon.)
There’s nothing in there that is a personal attack. If Dex is correct that he was mostly modded before for personal insults, then neither his nor Tom’s reasoning works.
First off, that’s not a defense. It’s an insult to the mods, calling them capricious jerks. The mods have went out of their way to say they don’t moderate on a whim. The idea that they have the legal right to moderate the board as they see fit does not mean that we cannot think they did a bad job.
Secondly, these mods you apparently think so poorly of also created a forum for us to air our grievances against their moderation. Not only that, but they often listen to what we say and weigh it against what they think.
Lastly, I’d tell you that you should leave if you don’t like it, but I don’t see the need to insult you the way you did everyone else. But I will suggest that, if you don’t like the way this thread is going, you don’t like this board in general, and you might want to do something about that besides insulting both the mods and the posters.
Its an insult to point out the obvious? That this is a private board with standards set and enforced by private individuals? According to what they perceive is fair?
You might have apoint if this were a decision handed down from above by Ed Zotti, and/or Dex or Tuba Diva, but that does not seem to be the case at all. The mods don’t own the site any more than you or I do. They are member-volunteers trying to manage a community on behalf of the community as a whole, so yes, they should care and I think they do care what the community as a whole thinks of their decisions.
If whoever owns the site now (I’ve lost track) wanted to close it down because it was losing them money (or bad for their image, or something) you might have a point - what we thought about it would not really matter - but that is not what is going on here at all.
Clearly, although no-one, so far as I know, had much love for Lekatt, there is a lot of feeling here that he has been treated unfairly and that this sets a bad precedent. I think we will all be looking over over our shoulders more if this stands. (Especially when this is taken together with the recent very questionable warning to Der Trihs).
I don’t think this was a bad judgement call at all. Well done, mods.
When someone is banned after only a few posts, no warnings, and no announcement, they are almost certainly a sock puppet.
As for lekatt, he was never a useful member of this community. But that is not any reason to ban him.
Well, I can sorta see the last warning as being defensible, since it essentially is using this site to advertise his products, which generally is a no-no about which he’s been told before. He could just have linked to any pertinent studies, surveys etc. instead.
But the other three warnings seem to be of a blatant ‘we don’t like your kind here’-nature, which makes tomndeb’s assertion in his warning that lekatt is ‘free to post his own beliefs in his posts’ seem to be a bit of a joke IMHO. I’m not going to pretend that I’ll miss the contribution he brought to these boards, but I’d hate to see this becoming the kind of place where such things lead to warnings and bans. (I’m not going to huffily threaten to leave or anything like that, probably nobody would care about that anyway, but this would definitely dampen my enthusiasm for this board.)
I don’t think we should be so quick to ban people. We are in danger of becoming quite dull around here.
And it’s difficult to fight ignorance if the ignorant aren’t here.
Isn’t there some way that we can entice ignorant people here so that we can fight them?
For what it’s worth, this.
I don’t want a homogeneous community either, but there’s enough ignorance in the world that we can pick our battles. More to the point, people should come here to fight their own ignorance, not to fight someone else’s. Someone who has put up a huge force field around his ignorance doesn’t seem to be a good fit for this message board.
Sometimes you have to bait the trap.
XXX cured me! God is dead! Evolution rules! Obama!
Like that. 
So long as we all admit that we each were lured.
Well, I read the four links in the thread announcing the banning and to be honest, I still have no idea what he was actually banned for. I guess the mods just wanted him gone and thats that.
Quick?? Certainly not in this particular case. He has been linking to anonymous stories and otherworldly essays (mostly written by himself) from his website for years when asked to provided scientific evidence for his fantastic claims, and the mods warned him many times to cut it out.
In all the deluded ways of SEO I cannot imagine a less pleasant way of drumming up views than exposing a website to the assorted nutcases who inhabit internet forums.
Most of whom have serious anger issues.