[Les Waste]

I've been on a board that went through this exact same problem. People started getting banned for reasons like "being sarcastic" or saying bad things about the site the board was part of. Even though a lot of these people were ISP banned, they were still very bitter about being banned for really no good reason.

What happened was a large group of people who were banned were re-registering (I don't know who said it, but it really is easy to get around an ISP ban) and starting to purposefully make the forum suck. They would flood the forum with worthless topics so bad that you would need to look at page 8 of the forum to see the start of the legitimate threads.

And it's not like it was that bad. I was a mod on that board, and it wasn't that hard to prune out all the retarded threads, but it was inconvenient. And a mod wasn't always online, so people would come to the board, see several pages of bullshit threads, and leave. People stopped coming to the board, and that's without even mentioning that most of the threads that weren't flood threads where people who weren't banned complaining that the people who were banned shouldn't have been banned.

I agree with VinceZeb, and that's the position I took when this admin was banning everyone he didn't like. It's not a democracy, it really is a dictatorship. But that doesn't mean people are going to like it and decide to stay around. And if there's a mass exodus, the boards will suck more than they do before people started to get banned because the only person left would be Cap'n Crunch.

I think there should be more people banned, but I think the rules should be extremely well established. I think turning off post counts is a good idea, I think giving people warnings is a good idea, and I think banning people for 30 days is a good idea. As long as people don't get banned for "being annoying" or "being gay."