bzt678 wrote:
Yes, that's acceptable and I promise I won't create new accounts, as long as you promise me the moderators won't delete my question about the removal of the flameless OS/Z topic, and I'll get an answer why Brendan did that...
You don't need an answer to that - you won the point just by drawing attention to it. No one can answer your question but Brendan, and I don't see any reason why he'd want to?
What actually happened here? We had an argument between bzt and a rogue moderator, and bzt stood up to him even though he knew it risked a ban, but he did this on point of principle. I haven't seen any unacceptable behaviour from bzt aimed at anyone other than Brendan, and all the wayward stuff aimed at Brendan was a justifiable reaction to Brendan's bad behaviour. Who did he harm through this? Did he damage the community or did he help to expose a problem with it? If a prefect in a school bullies someone and that person hits back, should they both be expelled? If the victim keeps speaking up for himself afterwards, should that push things in favour of expelling him too? I don't think so - that would be like an extension of the bullying. The fair way to deal with that is to let him back in and keep an eye on his behaviour afterwards - if no new reason ever comes up for a ban, then there is clearly no need for a ban. In the unlikely event that he does something unacceptable to the community after being let back in under his own identity (as opposed to going under the radar by posing as someone new and vandalising the wiki), then the whole community will see that a ban is appropriate. I would be very surprised if there's ever a need for that to happen. Anyone in bzt's situation deserves to be given a second chance, although in his case, unless I've missed something, it shouldn't even be described in those terms as he doesn't appear to have done anything immoral in the first place. What's his worst offence? He demanded that all his contributions to the wiki be deleted because he was abused by the community he had given them to. In reality, I think we all owe him an apology for standing back and allowing him to be abused.
(And if he promotes a file system that a moderator considers to be flawed in its design, all the mod needs to do is add a warning to it making a recommendation that people check out better alternatives - then its up to people to do their own proper research and apply their own intelligence to identify the superior design.)