As most of you know I usually do not get involved with staff decisions or banning people. This is mostly because I'd much rather dedicate the time that I do spend here on developing for the server.
However, there are some days where I do peek in the shoutbox and all I see is the same old people - people who are more often than not banned from the server for very good reason - spam toxic things in the shoutbox. Be it racist/homophobic memes or things that are clearly aimed at harassing certain community members.
Usually I do tolerate some of this behaviour, but today has reached such massive levels that it was too much for me and I could no longer just watch.
As a community we simply cannot accept toxic behaviour as was on display today. What do you think a new player who signs up to the forum thinks when the shoutbox is just full of these types of things constantly? It's not good for the community or for the server, so we needed to put an end to this.
Now as many of you would rightly ask, why should we community wide ban these people rather just handing out more lenient bans?
Most of the people were banned from the server already and were just trolling in the shoutbox. When you are already banned and clearly don't care about changing your behaviour then I don't see any reason to keep you around.
Many others are players who do not even play the server anymore and seemingly are only active in the shoutbox. If you come here just to be toxic, then I don't see how that helps the community, especially considering you don't even play on the server.
If you feel like you were just caught in the crossfire and were just trying to post funny pictures and didn't know when to stop, then feel free to appeal with me directly.
Some replies to people who posted in this thread;
@Lelios1 Many of the banned users have been posting racist/homophobic posts/images in the shoutbox for quite some time and I am frankly not sure why we did not ban them for it earlier. That is my only regret in this whole matter.
@DANIEL_: You were banned because you posted a ban appeal for someone that reposted the image they were banned for, which made it seem you were just trolling and making a ban appeal just to post the image. After some discussion we did give you the benefit of the doubt in this case and unbanned you.
@Jay_: No one here thinks that we can just solve racism/homophobia by changing an avatar, which is just a symbol and achieves nothing. Banning people who are actively engaging in racist/homophobic behaviour at least ensures that our community does not become a harbor for these people.
@thehomelessdude: If other people act in a similar fashion to the people who got banned today, please send me evidence and it will be dealt with appropriately.