lou should be allowed a ban or two others have called for enough without the "censorship is why xpt was created" shit. points lost for any use of the word "personal" or reference to authoritarian rule, slippery slope metaphors or "abusing" power.

he's smart enough not to know what's a longstanding-spat between a few users that can get a bit out of hand or annoying sometimes but really doesn't affect most of us. if he could ban brandon, who he loves jousting with, i can't imagine he would instead of fight on and he's never lost his shit and gone overboard despite being ready for a fight or already in one constantly.

from time to time, posters are so prolific and annoying for a long enough period they absolutely can drive users away from the board after a while.
but the deleterious to the best interest of the forum's health who operate on high volume/shit-posting generally have been oft-discussed as someone when singled out a lot more people come out with very strong negative feelings about their posting here than the other camp that usually uses the 'free speech' argument.....
BUT notice how many times the same people admit to really enjoying the person they're defending's postings here. not often. so it's really a "yes" or "i don't like him, but choose to defend a concept" deal in the big witch hunting threads.

what was that movie about college where someone started a chant "we're not going to protest!" at some rally. can we just fucking trust his judgement and agree to the same line if he feels the person's detracting from other people's motivation to post/read based on a long history of sucking? he knows what's a flamewar and what's malignant to xpt which probably could use a little 'greater good" thinking on the whole, not to discount plenty of entertaining posters still showing up, but the retention rate with their urge to keep posting well when it's swallowed in an abyss of garbage from one source seems to be happening more and more. really long threads are down, i'm convinced if it's not mostly pictures, the health of the place is best judged by the numbers of multipage threads around because it means enough users are reading, know what the hell is going on and who the other posters are to slog through a ten page thread and then want to add to it. fights can do 100-posts without giving a sign of how many actual people are around or care, but something with a lot of different avatars going well beyond where flamewars just fizzle may not be a perfect barometer and i'm not exactly logging hard numbers here, but it's not good if you go back 2 pages in a forum and the longest thread there's just a bumping of an older one.

whatever, the point i'm making is lou's got a pretty good track record here and if we take the fact he's got that trained german-shepard discriminate ability to bite what it's supposed to as a valuable-assed commodity here as a poster, if the posters and fellow mods whine or pressure him over a legit ban most celebrate and sigh in relief to, we're taking away a good poster and adding a mod who's probably going to be disinterested if he pulls the trigger on a target that would be listed as a highly-invasive species right there with asiatic carp in our freshwater ecosystems if they were just a bit more bestial then people cry and protest and he gets pressure from the mod board that maybe it'd be good to let him back is going to be the worst waste. give him two a year to play with and don't geld the guy if he's not above acting like an asshole not someone who's supposed to be held to standards above supreme-court nominees on a fucking pornboard. get over the idealistic shit, it's been done before and a lot of those times that same banned poster who's set free in the name of the 1st's right has ended up finally banned permanently because they were ALWAYS intolerable and sympathy for a cause blind to the poster himself's shittiness was a huge waste.

and lou, if you feel obligated to not post exactly like you would have before the color of your screename changed, it's time to stop the tightrope-walk between administrating-well and doing what you're good at. it's always better to say something's not for you than find yourself operating way under the capacity of what you were doing without a new responsibility. i'm guessing you'll be way out of your comfort zone if you start toeing the line between authority figure and community member with a bit more leeway for a reason.