Honestly, I wouldn't take the ban rationales on ResetEra as gospel. Those are only there for the administrators to set a narrative and give the illusion of transparency. They often don't match the reasons given in the unban tickets, and the administrators make all of their decisions in an invisible bubble that no one can see. Their "modwhining" rules (which are literally enforced as "contradicting the staff in any way") are there to keep people from exposing them or calling them out on their bullshit. Even calling their rules "strict" is misleading, because those are enforced wildly inconsistently and at the whim of administrators that don't have any integrity.
Case of point, I'm suing them for defamation of character within the coming months over this gem*. I sent them a legal notice warning them as such and they ignored it, which means this is probably going to have to go to court.
(Yes, there's absolutely a story here. The short version is that there was no harassment or disrespect leading up to the permanent ban, or anything that can be loosely construed as such. Their real reasons for banning me involved a multi-paragraph rant from Hecht about how I'm annoying and won't let people enjoy things, and Transistor telling me that I'm "making people miserable" by criticising an upcoming video game, even though many people have thanked me for the level of detail and effort I put into my posts. The rationale you see above was added days later as a retroactive attempt to justify an otherwise unjustifiable ban.)
That being said, we should make a distinction between the administrators (the people running the site) and the moderators (who are usually volunteers). Many of the moderators I have interacted with (such as Jawmuncher and Queen Vulpix) are great people that don't deserve any kind of condemnation. As someone who stayed off of sensitive threads and mostly frequented the PlayStation,
Silent Hill, DC Games, and horror communities, I also think the community itself (despite there being some toxic elements) is great and the people I hung out with are awesome. It's just a shame that the site is controlled by unscrupulous jerks that moderate it as their own personal sandbox and use bans in the same way a Redditor uses downvotes.
I'm actually the last person I ever expected to get permanently banned from that site, because I had been a productive member of that community for years. To give one example, I had been regularly updating the Silent Hill OT with any news, merchandise, interview updates, and Masahiro Ito's
Silent Hill tweets, which is another thing I've been thanked for by multiple people. I even earned the site positive media coverage for one of my posts (a couple of them:
1,
2) and I was hoping to get my own flair at some point. Predictably, several people were upset to learn I was banned.
It stings, but at the end of the day, there's a reason why when people read the ban rationale, their first thought is "What the f**k? I know Darkknight2149 can get passionate, but that doesn't sound like them." Meanwhile, the ResetEra administrators are downright
infamous for banning people for asinine and arbitrary reasons.
From what I'm reading on this thread, D-Pad sounds even worse though.
*The term "gem" here is used ironically and sarcastically to express derision of the dishonesty of the rationale