MC Banhammer Posted:

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.

One bot capped at every 30 seconds doesn’t kill anything. Using 10 bots to get around the flood warning is definitely cheeky. I guess you guys don’t agree, but when putting that much work into a system for spamming, I think some flag must have gone off in his head that maybe he was doing something wrong.

Not to mention, he was already permabanned. If someone comes back from a permaban with a new account, we always consider them on “thin ice” and will ban for something that someone else might get away with.