How do you know that the two cases are similar?
I mean this very seriously.
There's a superficial family resemblance between the two cases. In each case something was taken out of context and elevated to the point of banning a member when there were no clear violations of the ToS.
Time and an occasionally cloudy memory prevent me from rattling off all the specifics of the DC_DEEP case, except that, at the time, it was so very controversial as to have caused several posters, myself included, to take a principled stand and cease contributing to LPSG for a period of time.
Have you heard all the facts that the mods had to take into account when making their decision?
I'm going to have to presume that this is a rhetorical question, as we both know that I have no great insight into how LPSG is moderated. I was drawing what I felt was a fair comparison as I explained above. But you know as well as I that the moderation process, though much more open than at the time DC_DEEP was banned, remains obscure to the membership, hence all these Why Was [...] Banned? threads.
When I was a mod, it was a constant frustration, knowing that some vehement discussion on the board was turning on a set of assumptions that all the mods knew had no part in a particular deliberation.
That may be good or bad; we can have, once again, a discussion on how much secrecy should surround the deliberations in the mods' hall.
But given that those deliberations are, now, more or less secret ... we can't really assess the reasoning behind most decisions.
The first paragraph seems to be missing a key word or phrase, but what I'm reading is that it is frustrating for a mod when certain decisions are presumed by the membership to have been thoroughly vetted and debated when such was/is not always the case. If that's what you meant, it no doubt is enormously frustrating.
In the case of DC_DEEP's banning, it was eventually disclosed that the decision was done unilaterally. Again, my memory's kinda cloudy on this, but I do recall that a mod stepped forward with a
mea culpa and DC's membership was restored.
I have no way of knowing for certain if ML's banning was similarly decided, though I think that it's been pretty clearly been determined that no actual links or identification of the site that shall not be named were made. And I cannot understand using one's own words can justify the label "harassment", but harassment has a somewhat nebulous definition for some more than for others, so I can accept that such was the explanation for ML's banning without finding it reasonable in the least.
In light of my very limited knowledge of how the moderation decisions are ultimately handed down, I have no idea what discussion amongst which mods led to the banning; neither do you, as you state above. But it did seem to happen very quckly, almost spontaneously, at least from my angle here in the cheap seats.
Often very particular facts are brought to the attention of the mods that are invisible from almost any other vantage point.
Of this I have no doubt whatsoever, and I can only hope that there was some amount of intel that factored heavily into the decision to ban ML, because on the face of it, it looks unjust.
