Why is gturner banned?

As per the suggestion to start a new thread, I will now do so.

So I ask, why was gturner banned? And don't try to brush this off with "he was a danger to the board" or other such bullshit unless you are able to illustrate how. Also please cite any rules he broke with a link to any examples of it. I'm under the impression that you banned him simply because you didn't like him, but I'm willing to listen to any logical reasoning you can give to dissuade me from that viewpoint.

I await your response, whatever form that might take.

He planned the JFK assassination, I have proof.

He was banned for violating the Don't be an Asshole rule. Ownership got tired of his shit so banned him. In response to the... kerfluffle that followed over a month of debate and discussion took place and the Packard Amendment was accepted to further flesh out the Don't be an Asshole rule, moving it from one line in the beginning to it's own rule, Rule 8.

http://wordforge.net/index.php?threads/wordforge-rules-faq.108022/#post-2552450

If you'd like to debate this rule change I'd start a thread on it, either here or in the RR. If you'd just like to register your protest, it has been noted. Please feel free to start a RR thread that you can bump to your hearts content. I'm down with leaving this thread open for a bit in the case that an actual question that needs help from the mods or admins (the purpose of this forum) comes up but if it's just for complaining for another 4 months this will likely get locked.

I have yet to see any proof he violated this rule, and I find any suggestion that he be punished ex post facto after his initial ban to be ludicrous.

Noted.

So you haven't read it.

I've read what was claimed, but I disagree with the assertion that anything he did represented a rules violation of any kind, let alone something to provoke a permaban. So it looks to me like an abuse of power to ban someone that the admin staff simply decided they didn't like.

Rule 8 clearly states that there are no detailed instructions for not being an asshole (to prevent exactly this kind of troll lawyering), but that the staff is trusted to make that call instead. Unless you have evidence that the staff didn't make the call, you're clearly wrong.

The initial reaction and refusal to answer any questions, and all the drama over the months since this happened is plenty of evidence of abuse of power. There has been no evidence presented that gturner presented any kind of a threat to the board to warrant a permaban, and the closest anyone has come to explaining how he broke the "don't be an asshole" rule is to complain about how prolific his posting was and about their dislike of the political stuff he posted. It's been posited that his only purpose for being here was to troll, yet it's been shown that he contributed plenty to the board outside of political discussion. So what it comes down to is that they didn't like his politics and abused their power to permaban him after first attempting to shadow ban him by essentially restricting him to logging in and out of his account and PMs. The only rule he broke was in sharing PMs, and that was to show what had been done to his account as well as the threat he received (which was then carried out) from an admin. His actions were entirely reasonable given the lack of fair treatment he got from the admin staff so he can hardly be blamed for doing so. The overreaction to this only serves to cement the idea that the admin staff abused power to ban someone simply because he was unpopular, and this is reinforced by how the admin staff has treated the reaction to it.

Ok, I know for a fact that the rest of your post is bullshit, but if someone wants to point me to where this "threatened to be permabanned if he told people he didn't have access to the Violet Room" bullshit comes from, I guess that could still be interesting.

From a PM from John, IIRC. You know, the whole "sharing of PMs" thing that forms the only real basis for his ban.

And you saw this yourself, did you? Did you save a screenshot of it?

Because I'd honestly like to see that, if it exists. I think we all would.

And whoever shared it would get banned for sharing a PM, right?

@Dinner mentioned something about the PMs before, perhaps he can shed some light on the origin of it. Other than that, we have this post, which is the only non-pretentious explanation we ever got about this banning, and even that is based in the assumption that gturner had some ill intent by compromising his own account rather than just to show someone who might be taken more seriously than himself (given the obvious bias against him) what was going on. As I recall, one of those people was @Paladin, who I doubt anyone could accuse of being unfair or unreasonable, and another was @El Chup, who wasn't exactly a big fan of gturner either, and even he agreed what he saw was pretty shady.

Sweet Jesus, Oliver Stone, if you keep on it, maybe you can pin me for being the second gunman on the grassy knoll. Here are the PMs I sent gturner when he was restricted to the Violet Room.

Ok, so that claim was bullshit as well. Thanks for clearing that up. @Captain X, you really shouldn't share uncertain claims as if they were your own, and definitely not when they come from @Dinner.

Sure, because everyone else was, right? Oh, wait:

Nope, both of them not at all banned. Turns out the only person who got banned because @gturner broke the rules by sharing PMs was @gturner, who broke the rules by sharing PMs! Amazing. Quick, figure out why this doesn't make sense.

Yep, this, a thousand times this.

Do you notice how their excuse for their abuse has changed multiple times now? It took them four months , four damn months, to invent their current excuse which is transparently obvious as a lie.

Hell, the "I am just a regular poster" mod no trying to sell this preposterous nonsense has even, previously, been caught lying about GTurner claiming "he admitted he was just trolling over at TK" only the link he produced said absolutely nothing even remotely like what @Anvalahon claimed. It was not a mistake, it was not a misunderstanding, with 100% accuracy we can conclude that Ancalshon lied and fabricated that claim so his latest excuse presented in this thread four months after the fact... It just does not hold water. It is not believable.

A half dozen of us saw the PM from John in GT's inbox plus it was posted online. It was a deliberate act and John explicitly told GT that he would be permabanned if he told anyone about it. He blocked GT from all forums including the crap box then told him if he dared to use PMs to tell anyone he would be bannrd. That is exactly what happened.

This is why his banning is such a cluster f*ck and why not unbanning him is such a complete injustice. Even worse, the ones voting to keep him banned are the people who committed this crime, they should havr nothing to do with the decision to unban him or not as they are the guilty parties.

If anyone should be permabanned it is John the abuser.

So you're claiming that the screen shot of said PMs above is doctored? or that there are other PMs involved?

Oh, the possibilities...

John's PMs were not doctored, because I along with the rest of the admins was tagged on it.




And again, there was no communication from gturner to us about the VR snafu.

1) It was a pretty shady ban
2) Someone should close this thread to really put @Dinner over the edge

And how exactly is the warning about not using PMs or getting banned supposed to be interpreted?

Look, I know some of you are a bit slow at times, but you can't possibly be this obtuse! It just defies all reason.

As written? Or is that too much to ask?

Right, so now it just looks like John is threatening to ban him if he PMs anyone, like say to explain what had happened to him, for example. Do the two of you really think that makes it look any better?

Winner, winner, chicken dinner! Which is exactly what everyone has been saying all along while the mods pretend to be the only ones who just cannot see the obviousness of that threat.

Again, why is GT banned and why hasn't John been banned? John is obviously the guilty abusive party here.

Because no one knew why he was sharinsharing PMs and his password at the time. We didn't know because no one is a mindreader and no one knew he'd accidentally been blocked out the VR.

If anyone wanted to be shady, why bother with any explanation, let alone various staff members saying almost the exact same thing for four months now?

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."* - Hanlon's razor

The staff fucked up some settings, from gturner's end he thought he was banned, and the staff admitted they fucked up the settings. All of this could have been avoided had the staff double checked the settings, which has been more or less admitted by the staff ever since learning of the screwup. And beyond that, had gturner contacted the staff (as @John suggested he do should he have any questions), this could have further been avoided. Instead, gturner decided to skirt the rules after having been give several warnings not to do so.



*not intended as a flame to the staff, please don't send me to wherever gturner now resides

This. I've said it before, but I hate Xenforo, and one of the reasons is because I find the permissions system to be labyrinthine in every respect. There are dozens of settings for each user, forum, category, and add-on, and they are all connected. One missed checkbox, and someone can't post. You then have to dig through all of those settings to find the culprit. If he would have PMed me when it happened, I'd have said "oh shit, I better fix that." As it was, I ended up hearing about it from third parties, at which point I said "oh shit, I better fix that."

Interesting. Would the checkboxes for orthography and minimal human decency be connected by any chance?