one outright deleted
I always assumed you called that orbital strike in yourself. Was that The Toad himself deciding it wasn't worth the effort?
Unfortunately I don't even know the full story because I wasn't even around for the final few hours, but I assure you I
most definitely did not ask for that thread to be deleted.
My version of the story is that after spending literally over 10 hours designing an incredibly complicated forum game ruleset, GWG basically didn't like my rulings as GM, and spent several pages arguing with me, telling me that I, the GM of the game...was wrong. So I told him if he didn't like it, he didn't have to play, but to stop cluttering up the thread with complaints. To which he responded with a couple more pages of complaints where roughly every second post was from him, and it was massively interfering with the game itself. Eventually I locked the thread, with intent to unlock it after things had cooled down. And then I went to bed.
The following day I had a warning in my inbox from Toady and the
game thread had been replaced by a comment from Toady stating that both the game thread and its OOC thread, as well as a third "related thread" had all been deleted. What "third thread" you ask? I don't know. I never posted in it, I never saw it. But from what I gather, after I locked the game thread, GWG created a new thread solely for the purpose of resuming his flame war, possibly with one of his alt accounts. I don't even know. I never saw it. But whatever it was, the result was that my threads I'd invested a lot of time into were deleted.
So somewhere in there Toady offered some advice on how to deal with GWG in the future: just ignore him and report his posts. So the next game I created, GWG predictably showed up to cause trouble, signed up right away and sent me a bunch of PMs about it. I discretely responded via PM that I wasn't going to allow him into the game because too often when he was around, my threads ended up locked. He didn't take that well, and took to the thread to whine and complain to everyone about what an unreasonable, unfair dictator I was. Exactly as expected, others in the thread responded and it started degenerating into a flamewar.
So I didn't say a thing and simply reported him.
Toady ended it.
That was my final confrontation with GWG.
Interestingly, while I no longer see any of GWG's messages in my inbox, I do find this little gem from his tag-team insult-and-complain partner during the changeling broodlords thread:
Oh, nice. I hope losing all that effort you put into the game will teach you to be a better mod next time
That's from a person I won't name, but who very interestingly has a five year old account with nearly 6000 posts that oh-so-coincidentally was registered within several months of GWG's and that went inactive within two days of his ban.
Again, I think his MO was to make a nuisance of himself to make people angry so that he could report the people who got angry at him. I think he used alts and deliberately trolled threads to get them locked, I think he was good at it and I think he enjoyed it.