If you guys only knew what he thinks of you all. He sent me a scathing, rambling, rageful tantrum letter (as expected), and had some very unpleasant things to say about
you, the general membership. I will stop short of telling you what he actually said, but suffice it to say that he holds a degrading opinion of you all. He was here to be your "savior".
This is the pattern we see. A member develops a persona that is a little rough around the edges, and he sometimes write good content. After a while, he starts getting more and more belligerent, and it snowballs into outrageous, predatory behavior toward other members. During this period, we mods try to reason with him and get him to see that he's lighting up our radar like a Christmas tree, that the rules are there to keep the quality of the site up, that the rules are reasonable, etc.
He devolves more and more into a bully, picks more and more fights, and eventually we mods give temporary bans in the hope that will wake him up. Once the perma-ban happens, we get the inevitable raging, insane personal messages, where the guy goes completely off the rails, telling us what scum we and the membership are, how he disdains us all, and implies (or states outright), that he was our only hope.
@Epic Days encapsulates it well. These guys turn out to have had an online persona that many connected with, but the persona can't be sustained because behind the persona is a common narcissistic punk, a keyboard warrior who has very little control over his rage. Latent rage is
always at the heart of these situations, I find.
Interestingly, I have seen this happen once or twice where the member followed this script to a "T", but then quietly rejoined maybe a year later and ended up being a productive, well-respected member. It's rare, but it happens. We mods always recognize that it's this partiular person who has come back, but we give him a chance to see if he's changed.
These troublemakers try the mods to the limit, and I am convinced that they get to the stage where they are going for "suicide by cop". This is a little glimpse into what goes on behind the scenes. Most of you guys have no idea how hard we try to give slack and work with people in order to avoid the ban. We are slow to act, sometimes annoyingly so, because we don't want to ban anyone. All you guys see is the end result, not the work we do behind the scenes to keep the guy here. To the general public, it's "Poof, he's gone" and it seems like we've made a snap decision based on one infraction. The behind the scenes reality is a different story.
We mods aren't perfect, but we employ checks and balances and work as a group in order to avoid personal bias and wrong decisions. I might quickly ban a new member who is obviously nuts, but for the long-standing members, we work diligently to keep them here by discussing the situation and trying to be fair.
In the end, we get "The" letter from the person in question, which vindicates our decision and proves the bannee to be the raging, disrespectful punk that he is. These letters are so full of vitriol and hatred toward the site and you, the members, that you would be shocked to read them.
Suffice it to say that I am very comfortable with Julian's banning, and although I was not the one who banned him, I agreed to the decision. We make these decisions for the betterment and health of the forum,
never for personal vendettas or annoyances.
Every now and then I like to give a little behind-the-scenes glimpse of mod-land, in the hope that it conveys that there's always way more than meets the eye in a ban of a long-time member, and I personally think you guys deserve to know how we view our responsibilities. We take perma-bans very seriously and regard it as an absolute last resort. That inevitable, final message from the bannee, telling us how he really feels about you, the membership, always lets us know that we made the right decision.
