Ok so I made this huge thread about my issues with Matthew and thanks to butter fingers (page reload) I lost it all.
So I’ll just give the general beef.
The IRC Ban
Lets start off with the statement that the IRC Channel #vpsboard on FreeNode is an unofficial channel. Its basically the local bar some of the people in this community goes to after work to hang out. It's the water cooler at work. It's not everyone, and quite often majority of the people in that IRC Channel don't really post here. With that said, the Matthew's ban on IRC was done several months ago (or at least I believe it was several months ago, time has gone so fast). When he came into the IRC Channel every other sentence was about 32MB Club and what he just finished for it. Hell it was constantly "We now have ____ at 32MB Club!" or some variation of that. Even when I asked him to tone it down a bit he'd continue on. It was simple disregard for admin request. He then ended up pasting some file or something into IRC (which if you don't know, would send each line as it's own chat "line" and is commonly considered spamming). Therefore, I removed him from the channel. It was my decision to remove him from the IRC Channel (in addition to a few requests from individuals asking for him to be removed).
For those of you who do not participate in our IRC Channel, 99% of it is us screwing around and joking around. Business does happen on occassion, but majority of it is just horseplay. Then Matthew comes in and tries to throw his 32MB Club banners around. It's quite annoying. The bar owner requests he please stop or at least tone it down. Instead he disregards that and continues on. But then he brings in a megaphone and shouts a long piece of text (the pasting). He's therefore removed from the bar. Similar idea.
The Forum Ban
Since Matthew was banned from LET, his involvement in this community was drastically improved. The reason he was banned from LET was because he threatened Maarten Kossen on the internet or something. I mean come on, threatening someone? What situation calls for you to threaten another human being's life? Regardless, the LET bags were left at the doors (I may or may not have annoyingly brought it up every once in a while to poke fun, but that was about it).
So as Matthew's involvement in vpsBoard increased, so did the number of Admin Reports on his posts. What's crazy is that it wasn't from a single person, or a small group of individual, but a decent chunk of individuals on this forum who were reporting him. Sometimes, we even had four (or five?) people reporting the same content written by Matthew.
When we approached Matthew to tone it down on the forum, he seemed to acknowledge it and follow it for a short period of time. Then he'd be back doing the exact same thing again. He's also constantly asked for individual inputs and the wealth of knowledge we have available here. Then completely disregard it and go the opposite direction. He informed me he looks up to Jon Ngyuen (don't remember the proper spelling of his last name... my bad... basically GVH_Jon) as a role model. I mean, great for him for having a role model and someone to help him out, but it was going about it the wrong way.
So the reports continued to grow and every time we would perform a admin action on his posts he would then contact another admin and complain. Note (I'm sure Martin and MannDude both do this), whenever a post is removed I usually send a PM explaining why. Then he assumes it's off of my own whim I was removing his posts. There were several times when no moderator actions were done on his posts because it did not technically break the rules.
It came to a point where Matthew ended up creating a new thread for every single change in his life and his "company". Where he was going to live, his birthday, everything. Now I'm not saying I'm against him being excited for changes in his life, but we received many complaints from Forum members informing us that vpsBoard is in fact... not his blog. This came to a point where (I don't recall the exact link), I informed Matthew via a public forum post that his continued announcements of such frequency and manner would result in a ban from me under the rule "Do not spam". Then it went into a PM discussion about how he thought I was constantly targetting him. Yes he does bring the worst in me, yes he does annoy me terribly, but even with that set aside I've always tried to be as fair as I could within the vpsBoard Guidelines.
Anyways, with a continued reports on his posts and people talking to us about his removal, we began discussing this option much more in-depth as the staff. Under the guidelines, I would say his actual ban was over breaking "Do not spam" and him disregarding the requests of moderators and admins (in addition to being respectful to others input... which I would say if he asked for it and he got it, then at least provide reasons as to why he didn't follow ANY of it... and then you know... maybe stop asking).
Again, with the increased reports and posts such as "Are the mods protecting mtwiscool" and "What the hell are you guys even doing letting this guy stay?", I requested a "
suspension of normal procedures" (parliamentary procedure (Robert's Rule of Order) anyone?) to address the situation with Matthew.
The topic continued to be discussed and in the end we came to an unanimous decision to remove him.
I will do what I can in my capacity to understand and address everyone's concerns. This decision was not done lightly, and I hope my explaination of the situation helps point a picture from our perspective. It's not a clean fix, but our understanding and prediction was that even if he was removed from posting any offers, he would someone try and find a way to incorporate everything into his direction. Reader protection was in mind (people were assuming we're safe-harboring him) and community concerns were in mind. This was not executed in a malicious intent.
Again, please contact me if you have any concerns.
Summary
All in all, I'd like to bring this back up.
