A couple of days ago, I loudly banned alyaza. After investigating it more, I no longer believe that DearDeer was their alt account, so everything I accused them of doing in that post was not true, and they've been unbanned.

There are a lot of justifications and excuses I could give for why I got it wrong, but in the end it doesn't really matter. I made a somewhat-rushed decision, but I was confident about it at the time. Yesterday I spent more time looking into it, including following the invite chain and managing to get in contact with the person that sent the invite that DearDeer used to register. Between talking with that person (who was remarkably helpful) and some other info, I found more evidence that DearDeer wasn't alyaza than I had used to originally decide that it was, and realized that I was wrong.

This is a good example of why I don't like publicizing bans. Without me making that post about it, I'm sure this still would have been noticed by some people, but it could have been a relatively quiet temporary ban that lasted for about a day while it got sorted out. Instead, it ends up as a multi-day unnecessary spectacle. I'm not bothered by the effect on me because of that—I screwed up and deserve the embarrassment and criticism that comes from it, and I fully accept that. But it was unfair and cruel to alyaza to be falsely accused of things publicly, and that can't be reversed.

Decisions like this (and moderation in general) are often judgment calls that have to be made quickly and with incomplete information. Sometimes, like in this case, you make the wrong call, and more time, information, or an appeal leads you to reverse it. There can be value in having that happen in public, but there can also be harm, and I think this case absolutely leaned more towards the harmful end.

Anyway, I'll leave the comments open this time so that you can berate me appropriately. Please avoid commenting on alyaza personally though—I've already done enough damage and we don't need to continue that.

I generally haven't been making public posts about bans any more (there have been almost none recently anyway), but I'm sure there will be people wondering about this one since they were a very prolific poster.

I've banned alyaza. Whether it's temporary or permanent depends on how they justify it to me, but I told them that it would last for at least a week regardless. I've previously warned alyaza about their behavior multiple times (both publicly and privately), and they were aware that they were on their last chance to stop being so hostile when disagreeing with others. Today they registered a new account (DearDeer, which is also banned now) and started immediately using it in disingenuous ways, including arguing with the same comments from both accounts. I'm not sure if the intention was to circumvent that final warning instead of changing behavior, but it absolutely wasn't being used for good-faith purposes regardless.

I'm going to lock this thread immediately since it's really not worth fostering drama or dwelling on it with a big public discussion, but I wanted to post an explanation at least. If you have any questions or thoughts about it, please feel free to send me a message instead.