Some Problems I would like to talk about

[baka]

I haven't logged in for a while (well, I did try once but decided against posting when the board seemed overloaded) but I thought I'd put up my two cents on your third point. I don't believe permabans should be applied as quickly as they have been. I'll admit that Kwaad made the forums a bit unpleasant from time to time, and the volume of propaganda that he posted all over the board was a bit excessive on occasion. I for one stopped posting due to a perceived childish nature of the arguments, as well as the fact that replying was taking up too much time that I should have been spending elsewhere. However, despite anything he may have done, there is a need for balanced discussion. Balanced of course, not madly pulling in a given direction while spouting expletives e.g. washimul. That gives people something to post about, since discussion and debate require multiple viewpoints. He also had a point that there are a number of his contemporaries here for other platforms. I'd argue that none of the others went to quite the same level of excess, but nonetheless there was some truth to his statements. I'd hope that temporary bans would do the trick when a user is trolling the forums, and even these should probably be weighed against the amount of time that a user has been posting. Surely a percentage of troll vs. reasonable posts would seem to be the best route, but that's so subjective that it would be impossible to implement effectively. Another method might be number of positive posts for a platform versus negative posts for other platforms; that would level the playing field significantly, although it might require more effort on the part of the mods. Permabans on some of the most prolific users, particularly those that could potentially contribute reasonable arguments, will likely decrease the amount of users who return to the site over time. I'm not saying that Kwaad shouldn't ever be permabanned, it seems clear to me that he went outside the boundaries of reasonable debate from time to time, but it certainly seems to me as if he wasn't given sufficient temporary ban warning (the kind with real teeth) before being removed completely from the forums. Again, this is all just my 2 cents; take it or leave it. I'm logging out again. I'll continue to check the numbers of course, kudos to all involved in keeping the stats up to date.