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In fairness, people have been saying “the forum will die because you’re banning all the interesting people” for at least 5 years now.
On the other hand, we actually have banned some interesting people, and the forum is worse for their absence.
Okay buddy - you and @ABigGuy4U - I am calling your bluff. Who are the people we have permabanned who actually made the forum worse for their absence?
The only one I can think of is @HlynkaCG and he is extremely debatable - for every Hlynka-stan who misses him, there is someone who was screaming at us to ban him for years. And I've already written several times about how we did everything we could, short of just literally saying "The rules don't apply to Hlynka," to avoid having to permaban him.
Every other permaban I can think of might have been in some cases an "interesting" person, but they were interesting in the sense that they wrote high-effort screeds spitting high-effort venom, and the people upset that we banned them approved of the direction they were spitting.
Go on, tell me who on this list was a valuable contributor who you think should be granted amnesty?
We do not casually permaban people, and we let even the most belligerent and obnoxious people, if there is even a shred of redeeming quality in their posts, have multiple chances before we pull the trigger.
I personally don't find @BurdensomeCount's contributions very interesting, though I will say his trolling has gotten less blatant. I just skimmed the OP because it was the usual uninteresting BC sneering. He mostly gets away with it because he's toned down the celebratory triumphalism about enjoying the fruits of immigrating to the UK which he looks forward to being conquered by his people who will punish the white supremacist natives in good time. It was those kinds of posts that got him banned before.
"50% of the forum loves them and 50% hates their guts" is practically the definition of an interesting poster. If there's unanimous agreement that someone is a good contributor, then they may indeed be a "good" poster, but there's a cap on how interesting they can be.
My suggestion has always been that bans are capped at a length of one year, except in incredibly egregious cases (e.g. spam bots, or the person launched cyberattacks on the forum or something). I don't expect that this suggestion will ever actually be implemented, but it is a possibility nonetheless.
Hlynka is the primary example of course, also fuckduck9000, AhhhTheFrench, AlexanderTurok.
It's easy to be "interesting" (for some value of "interesting"). That's not the only criterion. The goal is not to be polarizing for its own sake. The guy going on about how having sex with your own prepubescent daughter should be legal was certainly interesting - and he wasn't even banned for expressing that opinion! He was banned for belligerently sneering at everyone who disagreed with him.
I wouldn't be against it, per se, I just predict with high confidence that those who take advantage of the opportunity to return after a one-year ban will get banned again in short order.
As I told @The_Nybbler, fuckduck wasn't that interesting. AhhhTheFrench was a one-trick pony ("Hurr hurr religious people are so dumb!"). Hlynka and Turok I'll grant were interesting. However, see above. If you can convince Zorba to grant them an amnesty, I wouldn't oppose it, but I am also fairly certain they will not change their posting styles, which means in short order we'd be back to "Okay, are they so interesting that we let them keep just ignoring the rules?"
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Looks like @fuckduck9000, banned for this, was banned for something far less inflammatory than stuff that barely merited a warning in this very thread.
I only vaguely remember @fuckduck9000. The ban was a year ago and it was @naraburns who banned him and I'm not going to read the entire thread to see if I agree with your summary, since your summaries are almost always disingenuous.
But let's look at @fuckduck9000's "valuable contributions": he had eight warnings and/or tempbans before he got permabanned. All of them were basically for petty shit-stirring and condescension, often by starting a "call-out" thread obviously intended to start a fight. He had zero AAQCs, and my recollection of him was basically just another sneering culture warrior (which fits your defense of him, he usually sneered at the people you like to sneer at) but he never did so in an interesting or effortful way.
So your example of someone who was a loss to the forum was an uninteresting, unmemorable snarler who was given many, many chances to improve. Try again.
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Depends on the point of view. Some people that I expect others to think were "interesting" really only had a few interesting ideas, ran out of them and got banned once their manner of conversation outweighed the reiteration of their ideas.
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