What did GWG do? I respect that Toady is conservative with his bans, unlike most forum admins I've encountered in my time on the internet, but I don't appreciate how he also tends to be above-averagely opaque about the reasons. Deletes the offending posts so we can't see what went wrong, and distills the reason for the ban to one short sentence that could encompass a huge variety of behaviors.
Toady isn't opaque at all about GWG's ban.
I just removed another giant insult-ridden argument between GWG and somebody. This despite at least seven warnings and a few mutes for this very infraction. I'm tired of cleaning up after GWG, so GWG has been banned. Please adjust your games as necessary.
He says there was an "insult-ridden argument between GWG and 'somebody'". We don't know who somebody is, or what was said, or who started it, or a number of other important factors in determining whether Toady's decision was justified.
In this particular case, I don't doubt that GWG really did insult someone to the degree where it would be ban-worthy, but this is a good opportunity for me to point out a significant issue with these forums' moderation even in comparison to certain other forums whose mods I'm not a fan of.
Everyone who has participated in forum games with him has probably seen him misbehaving at one point or another, and those are the only people who really have relevant opinions here -- if you didn't interact with him and weren't involved in any instances where he was warned or muted, you don't really have much room to talk about it. In addition, every other ban and mute I've seen in threads I've been active in has been much the same way: someone was out of line, Toady cleaned it up and made a post summarizing what happened and why, and everyone in the thread knew what was going on. Anything else would be excessive -- posting a long diatribe full of quotations would both be rather tasteless and set the wrong tone. It's not some sort of secret police conspiracy, it's handling problems without blowing them up into spectacles. Also what Tiruin said.
That aside, the petition thread already ran its course, so let's maybe not start filling the "X Today" threads with spillover, keep it to PMs eh?