Most of this has been addressed already but just to make a few points.

- Moderators have not "removed" posts, they are all blanked out automatically when a user is banned. For a user to be banned their "contribution" has been outside of the rules set out by this site and are therefore not welcome. To save a moderator having to go through a number of posts made by that user they are simply not shown. If someone wants to see what was written they can visit that user's profile and see the posts there.

- Why should you have to "know if the ban was deserved"? It has nothing to do with you. It is not a right you have to see why somebody was banned, if they display behaviour that goes against site rules they will be banned. The moderating team's decision is final.

- People should thank and show some respect towards moderators. It is a job they chose to do, without pay, for the better good of the site. It is more than you are doing for the site so they deserve your respect and at the very least to be spoken to in a non-offensive way - in fact that is expected of you when addressing any member of the community.

Hope this has cleared a few points up.

ioi

1) That's a bad system. It's like saying that because one cow has Mad Cow Disease that we should kill all cows in the world. It's overkill.

2) If someone in a black car pulls up to the 3rd house away from yours and takes away the people who live there, do you ask why? If someone in a black car then pulls up to the 2nd house away from yours and takes away the people there, do you ask why? If someone in a black car then pulls up to the house next to yours and takes away the people there, do you ask why? If someone in a black car then pulls up to your house, what do you do?  At what point should you be concerned about what's happening here?

When Konnichiwa got banned for an absurd length of time, I spoke up about it because it was very hasty and poor judgment on the part of the moderator. He was unbanned early IIRC. Moderators make mistakes, plenty of them. Why shouldn't the community be able to evaluate their judgments in case of another mistake?

That whole stupid thread that got GGE banned is a moderation mistake. That thread should have been locked long before the comments escalated to the point where someone got a ban. The fact that it went on so long is a testament to the fact that there is a problem.

3) Moderators do so by choice and they'll get thanks when they start doing a truly great job. The fact that threads like the one that got GGE banned go for 5 pages (!!!) before moderators step in and say "there's a problem here" shows that they're obviously not doing a great job.

stop whining at the time there were just no mods online so how could they do there job if they where not there?><

Not including ioi, there are 17 folks with red names floating around this website.  The fact that not even one of them was around is worrisome.

See, here's the thing. The basic premise of justice is the presumption of innocence until proven guilty. Unfortunately, nothing in the system allows us to find irrefutable proof that a poster is an alt account. So as seemingly bloody obvious as it is, we can't really ban anyone just on suspicion alone. All we can do is pay extra attention to those posters.

GGE earned his one week ban. The fact that it was for exactly what gballzack got banned for is, until proven otherwise, just coincedental.