If I want to push buttons I can dig and use less than smart stuff people said in the past too, but unlike him I refrain from it. Maybe I dislike him because he’s a bit like the side of my personality that I despise.
It's exactly that.
The problem with Hombre was not the 99% of posts where he said interesting stuff, regardless of the fact that we agreed or not with what he said.
The problem was the 1% of posts he made which were nothing less than harassment/stalking directed to a few users.
I gave the example of "Idiot of the village", but I also clearly remember multiple posts written to piss off 3 different Indonesian ladies, in thread where they did not even post and perhaps even read. These posts were clearly written to belittle them and to ridicule some statement they made, sometimes month ago. It wasn't 1 odd posts, there was multiple and recurring.
When a poster has 100 posts with 1% having this pattern, moderators can let it go. When a poster with 5.000 or more posts with 1% of them displaying the pattern described, it leaves mods plenty of opportunity to warn such poster and to acquire a conviction. Then when warnings are ignored, only one choice remain.
It's easy for users to forget or even miss these posts. The job of moderators is to track and spot them in order to insure ALL users a comfortable and nice experience browsing the forum.
In all honesty I couldn't care less if some regulars may/will miss the banned users postings. The forum is not a business and they are not clients. What imports me, and I am confident that this view is shared by the whole mod team, is that the community finds the information they look for in the forum and for this, the help of the 3 ladies I mentioned earlier and who end up deserting the forum due to Hombre's behavior was needed. I personally verified that the
sole reason for them (and others) to desert was the reason I claim it was. I am just ashamed that we waited so long to reach the decision we made. We have been weak and lenient, allowing too many of these shit posts, and it was a mistake.