I'm not being callous when I say that this is a necessary evil.
Effective admins never get enough credit because no one can know how many problems like this they have helped the forum avoid by nipping things in the bud.
This guy should be been booted the moment he he arrived with his og username. Instead some miscers rolled out a welcome wagon, dapping him up for his username and letting him know he has allies.
From that moment if MM (no hate) had been paying attention or undersrood what he was looking at he'd of known that his problem just got bigger and the odds of this dude taking any sort of sanctions personally had become greater. From that moment he needed to be managed through the welcome wagon that greeted him.
Y'all gonna give
Lightning Lord Rule
a God complex
But honestly, though...it's only ever as hard as you (and your users) make it.
One of the problems we used to have, IMHO, was that we wanted to try to 'save' everyone. Especially after we lost our home the first or second time. So we tried being lenient and added in some boundaries, and all anyone did was try to push those boundaries as hard as they fucking could. And we didn't want to be super-strict or to just ban people outright, and we paid for that with a lot of fucking misery and frustration.
If you're too strict with 'sticking to the rules', then that just opens up the door to the rules lawyers.
Now, I don't know if certain people should have been banned as soon as they joined with a particular username, but as soon as they started being shitheads and being purposely disruptive? Yeah, that'd be a 'NO' from me. That's not some sort of fucking accident...that's someone getting away with murder because they're allowed to get away with it.
When Miscmath or whoever that was, that rolled out the
"well it's not against the rules", that just highlighted the problem. If you know what the problem is, then...handle it. In that sense,
Lanx
wasn't wrong.
Now I'll mildly bust LRR's chops or mildly 'shitpost' (lololol) but I really try to stop there. There's been a couple of occasions where I've 'lost my chill', but I'll take whatever punishment I get, and it's not like I'm out to harm the entire forum or something...which is really what it looks like certain people are doing over there.