A couple comments:
First off: the decision to un-ban TheWho was a unanimous one between ginger, myself, and kelly. On examination, we found that Deborah's definition of "flooding" did not fit with an accepted technical definition. There were other reasons, but that was the main one. If he were considered to be "flooding" then so would be many other posters who posted as anon most of, if not all of the time.
Secondly: a bounty was put on TheWho's identity a while ago. That means posters would pay somebody who knew who he was and outed him. This would not be an outing by the "mods"/"admins" but by somebody who personally knew him and could confirm his identity somehow (for example, a coworker, employee, or even his wife).
Thirdly: posters have never been censored (with a rare eception of once where there was a flooding of porn and the respective posts were moved to a "grand unified gay porn" thread in the open free-for-all). Now all image posting is disabled, which removes the human decision of what to censor, and thus it's not censorship, but a blanket change in functionality. Posters
have been threatened and/or outed, but only by other posters, not the administration (eg: Ajax13 was "outed", presumably by AARC... Kevin's daughter's info was posted on the forum, presumably by PV). In that case, it's a difficult decision not to censor, but those respective posts still remain on the forum. We don't censor here without a court order to take something down, period. Ginger will not allow it, and the buck has always and (FSM willing) will always stop there.
Fourthly: If the forum was slow because of the Who, that would constitute flooding in the accepted technical definition and he would be banned. Sadly, that is not the case. The forum was slow because we were on shared hosting and somebody else who was using the same shared server was hogging all the resources. Now we're on a (more expensive) virtual private server with guaranteed system resources. The forum shouldn't be having any problems in the future.
Fifthly:
TheWho already has a substitute account.
http://www.fornits.com/wwf/memberlist.p ... ile&u=4500
It's not TheWho's account, or a substitute one. it's an imitator, like ThéWho.
If TheWho keeps his word, he'll stay off the forum. That's really the best anybody can hope for. Banning him has not worked anyhow. He uses proxies, and when we banned the entire range (no doubt with collateral damage to legit posters), switched to
dialup. It's futile to try and ban him on a forum where guest posting is allowed and all that is required to get around a "ban" is to switch IPs. The most anybody can hope for is if he keeps his word to stay off.
Back to the auction.....
Going once to Ursus for 90 dollars.At the current VPS settings, that will last us for three problem free months.
