If that was in the “Salty Walls” thread, my post was the first one, not a reply to anyone, and to my way of thinking not off-topic or offensive. It earned a “Good Reply”. Now it has disappeared without a trace, and with no notification.
Was it flagged? And if so, shouldn’t I have received an automated “Ya done screwed up” message?
Improbus has been banned. Not for offtopic remarks to an Author in a post, but for lobbing insults after the post was removed. As a reminder, Private Messages are still subject to our community guidelines. The BBS is never a safe space to attack others.
Accounts are banned every day, most of them spammers or first-timers not worth a mention here. Just today a TERF who tried to de-rail the Quadball topic was banned.
That just means no one who’s been around a while has been banned or given a timeout. New user trolls get banned dozens of times a day, often so fast that most people never even see their posts.
Over time, the site has been doing better. The amount of time that our malicious but sneaky posters have been able to persist here has been steadily and consistently reduced over the years.
If we’re considering that, we might want to do something about usernames- if you’re going to delete old user, letting someone else jump on the now vacant handle could be confusing.
The number of accounts like this that have been deleted over the years is shocking. Some people were sure they wanted to make a lot of trouble over a long period. This hasn’t been 5-10 but dozens upon dozens over years and years.
That is a discourse-level user management thing. The software doesn’t let that happen. I believe this is why Ken has had all accounts inactive for one year require a manual new password upon reactivation, but I believe many of these tick a log-in box frequently.
If there is a user who joined some time ago but never posted they could still be using features like following topics that interest them. Or viewing new posts, etc…
If those users are suddenly posting causing trouble, then in my opinion treat them like all users, flag posts and let the moderators sort it out.
I belong to many hobby forums, some of them I rarely post but do have a posting history and like to follow topics that interest me. I wouldn’t be happy if I lost my following history because my account was removed because I didn’t participate regularly. I also like logging in and seeing new posts since my last visit.
In this forum I don’t even notice a poster’s join date and I rarely look at a poster’s profile.
Has there been a problem, I thought there was just a post talking about how there haven’t been any poster bans in a while and most people were behaving. I haven’t seen any disruptive posts in a while.