And that's a bannable offense? At least he was making threads, there aren't really enough people here actually doing that and there were usually some pretty good posts in the threads despite whatever B-Cell wrote and the usual B-Cell bashing. It's not like he was flooding the forums with threads, just one every couple of weeks or months.
More than anything I feel bad for him. He was obviously outside of the neuronormal of our 20-50 year old userbase and just wanted an area to express his opinions on what he liked or didn't like. He reminded me of my grandpa in a way. My grandpa was really into philosophy so I made him an account on an online philosophy forum. He was okay with computers but not really enough to handle logging in and formatting posts, so I would post for him. He spent a lot of time reading through threads, but not posting much because I needed to do it for him. When he wanted to make a post it was usually a new thread where he would give a long, rambling, and not entirely coherent description of his personal beliefs. There wasn't that much conventional 'discussion value' in his posts and near the end I had trouble getting them posted and was even banned one time without a reason given. Reading and posting on that forum was one of the highlights of his life, he would always be excited when one of his threads got a lot of comments or views even if they weren't positive, but he wasn't able to do it because people didn't think he had enough to contribute and couldn't express himself well enough anymore.
Anyway, I don't know B-Cell's situation, but I just think "what if it's similar to that." And it makes me sad that he might not be able to do something harmless that made him happy anymore.
Did your grandpa look at the posts that people made on his threads and actually learn from them, develop his way of thinking further, and make an effort to have his ideas challenged in hopes he might learn something new? Did he bring new, varied topics every now and again, going into different trains of thought? If he did any 1 of those things, he did many times more than B-Cell ever did.
Like Houseman, I think it was death by a thousand cuts. The mods saw B-Cell making these threads for YEARS on the V1 forum, and he never once changed his opinions or changed his format in any way. He just swapped out some words, changed the title, changed the topic, but otherwise the thread could be note for note copy-pastes from his previous ones. It got to the point here where it would devolve into bashing (In which I admit I took part in) because many of us wanted him so deeply to
evolve even just a tiny bit. But I think it became clear that even years down the line he was still spouting the same copy-pasted nonsense that the threads ended up not being remotely about his "discussion" topic, and the mods felt it better to cut him out.
There's a clear attitude I get from the rules and leadership here that you have to be open to other people's opinions, and be ready to develop from the discussion and hopefully change and grow along with it, rather than just come here to spout one's opinion and refuse to budge even the tiniest inch, because that defeats the purpose of the discussion. If everyone else' opinions don't matter, then like I said before, the forum's just being used as a sounding board for one's opinion and nothing more. It's fine to have our values and opinions and hold them close. But unless we're here to actually be challenged and learn new things and hear new opinions, then why bother making a "discussion" post in the first place?
Several people including myself tried to teach him, help him improve his topics and discussions, broaden his perspective, and so on. We genuinely wanted better topics from him, we wanted him to improve. B-Cell made it clear he didn't post to "discuss" like he said, or to learn, or to change, and he kept that up for
years. And that's what did him in. He was just filling empty space only for himself as far as we and the mods could tell. There's a reason he earned the nickname "Biased-Cell" among a few users
