disgusted by libcom admins

I second Dino's remarks, an entire dimension of at least one debate has been excised by the bannings.

But the "debate" was going round and round in circles and had descended into abuse and playground name-calling.

So to stop the circular motion, one side of the debate had to be purged so that everybody is pulling on the same side?

If I understand correctly, lines was banned for falsely stating that some Solfed organizers are working on their PhDs, when in fact only one Solfed organizer is currently working on a PhD? And Blasto was banned for quoting lines without correcting his math?

Blasto and Samotnaf are only temporarily banned so kind of a shit purge really.

I shouldn't have replied, I'm really not interested in the whole debate except that I find it quite tragic that people who should be working together with common interest instead act destructively. I think it's a "storm in a teacup".

Even just saying that will no doubt add to the storm.

lines was also banned for abusing the report function, making it impossible to actually moderate the academia thread properly. lines should have been banned sooner because of his/her constant lying, making up "facts" and general trolling.

I think the temp banning of blasto was unnecessary, but understand why samontnaf was banned after his rather childish posts.

and btw, dinos. you can't see unpublished posts so you probably haven't seen the reason why threads were locked etc. I still, however, believe that it wasn't that necesary to close the the revolutionaries in academia thread and would like to see it opened again. while there was a bit of derailing for a bit I thought the discussion was decent.

You don't understand correctly. Tastybrain, who started the thread, started another thread to request admins moderate it to prevent derails. Admins posted warnings about derails, and lines took this as a queue to post some more derail (including some completely made up claims about SolFed). He was then warned by an admin, carried on on tastybrain's second thread, spammed the report function and was banned.

Then, blasto and Samotnaf decided to hijack tastybrain's thread requesting moderation to defend lines' right to make up off-topic lies, there was some more spaming of the report function, people were warned, carried on, and were also banned. So basically all you have to do to avoid being banned is refrain from repeatedly derailing threads, making up lies, ignoring admin warnings and posting frankly bizarre trolls.

It is absolutely typical trolling to deliberately provoke moderation, then try to create a scandal about 'disgusting', 'outrageous' 'censorship', 'silencing' etc. We've spent hours this evening alone tidying up all this shit and we're under no obligation to provide a platform for people to continually and deliberately flout the posting guidelines.

As a point of information it is open and has never been locked. It's symptomatic of the obfuscation and volume of lies and disinformation of this particular episode of trolling that reasonable people could even think otherwise!

And now we've spent yet more time on this bullshit. Any more threads on 'But why????' will be considered spamming as it has been explained already repeatedly. If you don't like the explanation, then it isn't going to change by asking again and again and again. If anyone has any further questions or queries about the moderation of the thread they can use the contact form and the admins will discuss it and respond. This tired routine of flouting posting guidelines then crying about victimisation is a massive waste of everyone's time and we're not going to explain it over and over, which would only fuel the scandal-mongering, disinformation and trolling. We're not going to spend the days leading up to the biggest strike in a generation dealing with people with nothing better to do than troll an internet forum.