I've debated whether to make this public or not and have decided to make it public for a number of reasons.

1) Other boards do notify the members of bannings by use of "BANNED" titles for their banned posters and sometimes they also post threads as to which poster was banned and why.

2) I need the members here to know that this poster was being warned behind the scenes and the warnings were followed through. If you complained about this poster or others, your concerns were not ignored, any actions we take behind the scenes are kept private between the moderating staff and the poster.

3) I also want to point out that banning is not an idle threat here. We like to give people the benefit of a little doubt and try to help them fit in to this community. When it becomes obvious that a poster will not abide by the Community Standards and forum rules we will take action to remove them as per the CS. Bannings (of non-spamming members) are actually quite rare since most of the time I think we do quite well at getting along.

4) The poster in question, though new, was quite active and some people may be wondering what happened to him.

The poster who has been banned is STUDMUFFIN.

Some of you may not be surprised but some of you may have missed the posts that led to this action, because we remove these posts from public view they are available only to the moderating staff and some of the offensive posts from him were in the form of PMs to other posters and myself. Suffice to say that we tried to be patient with him and his posting style. After many unofficial PM's about his behavior we started issuing warnings. His posts became more offensive in rapid succession quickly eating through his official warnings and resulting in a ban.

He was offered the chance to petition for a temporary ban so that he could return, however I don't believe he will be interested.

I am going to leave this open for possible discussion only because I don't want to see this come up elsewhere in the forums. I would also like anyone else who may have received offensive PMs from this poster to let us know and PM the text of those messages to me.

We do not allow bashing of posters, banned or otherwise, so please don't go there. Commenting on a banned poster does not exempt you from following Community Standards. If this thread gets out of line it will be locked.

Well... this is really interesting to me but I'm not sure how other posters will be able to discuss this on this thread if we don't know exactly what caused it. From what I saw, Stud was kinda annoying but ultimately harmless... I dunno, I guess I'm just not clear what he did that crossed the line.

If you can't show the offending posts, can you describe them?
It's not really any issue that I care to press, because I think it's pretty clear to me what is and isn't acceptable behavior here... but I am curious.

It seems that he had this nasty habit of getting drunk, and deciding (in that state) that community standards were there to be flouted (often in a non-PG 13 way), while giving the mods a hard time about it was a laugh riot. After a while, this kind of lost its charm.

I stopped paying attention to Stud's posts, but what I did see didn't seem particularly offensive. Tasteless, annoying and juvenile, yes. Especially in light of the posts of other certain infamous members of recent memory that have, arguably, been more offensive then Stud but were not, to the best of my knowledge, been banned.

Then again, both of the posters I'm thinking of left of their own accord after it became apparent that they weren't wanted. I take it that Stud was banned because he didn't, then?

Looking back over Wile E's OP, I suspect that the PMs were the straw that crippled the proverbial camel...

And the mods are just too darned efficient at removing offensive posts sometimes (What? So I get a giggle out of them on occasion...like YOU don't!)

Gee, sorry about that...though I doubt you would have been all that amused, Old Crow.

No, probably not. Drunken rants and pokey-chest aren't that amusing at the Officer's Mess...I doubt virtual ones would be either.

Without repeating the exact comments; he made some racial/ethnic slurs that were way over the line and did so on more than one occasion, that along with some PM's and other recent inappropriate comments were the final straws. There were also instances of contant use of netspeak despite being asked to stop and some other highly inappropriate comments. However, despite many PM's to him about his behavior here he did not start receiving official warnings until very recently, we had been very patient with him. Once the warnings started the rest were given in quick succession. I think he was testing how far he could push us. By that point, it was not very far.


I do consider it a compliment to the moderators that not everyone had to be subjected to these comments but some people did see them and I think they can vouch for the offensiveness of the posts.

I saw them twice in the last week or so. I never liked him before, but the obvious nastiness in his posts, i couldnt decide if he was drunk, completely lacking in self-awareness, or just a jerk. This may come off as bashing, but im trying to hold back here, and reporting the impression i was given from the most significant incidents i ran across.

One set of posts was an obvious attempt to make an offensive racy image about a random sluggy character (im too kind to mention who).

The other was a thread to support one of the more offensive video games out tere, made by him, in which he extolled the chances of random violence and used at least one particularly mean racial slur.

If he was PMing trouble too, im glad he never decided I was a target.

Wow, I missed the game thread.

Actually, I think I missed most of the more obnoxious posts. Still, it's not surprising to learn that he was worse than I was thinking.

Umm....

Go Mods for keeping Sluggy cool!

I think most of us did. It can't have been up for very long.

It wasn't very worthwhile. Even if he had written it completely cleanly, it was a rather worthless "this is the best game ever" thread, not any sort of discussion or debate.

It wasn't up for very long, a few people managed to respond, but both greg and I were online when he posted it. In fact I was locking it while greg was posting a message that he was going to lock it.

When he first started posting I pretty much saw him as an Oscar the Grouch type of character. The one ray of the rest of the world (the internet, in this case) that seeps into an otherwise idyllic setting (here referring to the Sluggy forums).
I actually saw one of his posts which made a joke about the Holocaust. I had just ignored him up until then, but that was when I think he crossed the line.
If memory serves, he never really contributed all that much in spec, POOP, GC, etc. All I can recall him doing is making annoying posts in otherwise serious threads.
Without wanting to sound TOO mean-spirited, I say good riddance.

Question. Since when are PM's held to CS? I thought that the whole point is that you can say whatever you want there. Talk about the banned subject, or in ways that go over the pg-13 limit. Am I wrong?

You know, its MY private message and you can't tell me what to do with it.