To add emphasis to ML's point. Please report any post you feel violates the TOS, by anyone. We get notified for every one. Specifically, not only do we get a private message here, but I get an email forwarded to me personally. Usually, by the time I get logged into an email notification, ML has already done something about it. But if we don't know, we can't do anything about it unless we stumble across it.
I would also point out that the purpose of moderation like this is not to police people's relationships. We do not want to be a black-and-white legal system. The purpose of moderation is aimed not at controlling people, but at encouraging healthy conversation and community. What that means is that some things people might see as violations of the TOS might not have action taken if such an action would be disruptive to the community greater than the worth of the violation. This is a very human-centric approach, not a legalistic one. What we have see over time is that SAG consistently poisoned certain conversations and refused to even try to engage respectfully with certain people. Other people may have violated the TOS, but are not consistently problematic. People have bad days, and we don't want to be mods that permanently damage feelings or relationships because someone got twisted on a hot topic once. We have seen other relationships that had rough spots, but people interested in working through them did exactly that. We saw many people reach out to StillAGhost publicly and many of us engaged with him privately to try and make his presence here more productive than destructive. He repeatedly made it clear that not only would he not change, but he felt it was his duty and right to be abusive to people who felt were incorrect or misguided in his eyes. Most other people who have violated TOS on occasion do not exhibit that kind of chronic behavior.
Again, we do not want to be heavy-handed moderators, thus it has literally taken years for all of us to experience enough of Ghosts's behavior to agree that his presence was more unhealthy than productive.
I know that I am somewhat central to the situation with Ghost, because for whatever reasons, he has long seen me as a target. We had a relationship where I could publicly and strongly agree with him, and he still attacked me. For this reason it was important that the moderators all be in agreement for this action. Having said that, I will again reiterate that if anyone has a problem with my actions as a moderator, please report them to Mama Liberty, and Elias at a minimum. They will be discussed, and we'll see what I can do to improve.
