Evil Trout Posted:

MST had scripted 10 alts to spam every 30 seconds to get around the flood detection. You don’t do something like that without the thought “hey, maybe I am doing something wrong” crossing your mind.

I’m going to disagree with you here, boss.

I believe he was going for the Flamebate epeen on the banned account. Pretty funny IMO. And as has been discussed above, the most effective way of doing that has been to spam tubmail. People have done it before, manually. Tom wrote a script to do that job for him, with a damn entertaining and effective tubmail content. (Just witness the, what are we up, 100 reports about hitting the haxxor page following the link?)

The key thing here, which is why I believe you banned him, was the cost of the resultant e-mails. I don’t think that was ever his intent; I know I never think when I send a tubmail “Oh, and I’m probably sending so-and-so an email as well. I wonder how that impacts CZ’s email limit, which I was unaware of until two days ago?”

I also don’t think that the bots caused undue server stress. People have used them to post in the “consecutive posts in a row” contests with no known issues.

So unless you have some sort of proof of intent to cause you problems with this particular stunt (easy enough to check, I’d think, in his klan forums), I think he’s being punished for a completely unintended side-effect of what should have been innocuous fun.

Evil Trout Posted:

We also didn’t have a rule that you couldn’t embed links that would delete every major klan, but we permabanned him for that the first time around.

As to that, I think we did have the “causing users to perform actions against their will” clause at the time, so that one was justified.