Moderation Enforced

Yes, but if it's truly a big enough problem to make a change that will affect every other user on the forum, at the very least, it should be a problem for the majority of the forum users as well as the staff right?

If our message to users is that nothing they do will ever be punished as long as they're more persistent than the moderators how do you think that will effect the rest of the user population?

What do you think I want? From the entire beginning of the thread the only thing I was saying is that this was made because of one person.

It was made because the most recent person to do it revealed an obvious incentive for future occurrences and this was the best deterrent we could come up with, since the threat of continual banning and after-the-fact-removal clearly were not working. You've got a poor grasp of the big picture.

When a situation occurs, or recurs, the process is very straightforward.

We evaluate how to clean it up, and we evaluate how to prevent it from recurring and whether or not it's potentially something other's are likely to do for similar reasons. Since this particular crime is driven by ego and the people who try to prove they're above banning or too smart to ban, or whatever else, are primarily driven by ego this was determined to have a high potential for drawing future abuse if not safeguarded in some manner.

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Back to the actual topic since we're several pages in now;

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We emplace sanctions like this with whatever tools we currently have available, or can readily obtain, while we evaluate long term solutions.
I was perfectly clear in the OP that this is not something we wanted to do, and something we hope to have to do minimally. I did not say it was forever. I've specifically pointed out that we intend to revisit it based on how burdensome and how effective it is, and it should go without saying that while it's in effect we've already been looking at ways to improve it or more effective alternatives for long term.

The people who keep making claims about changing my mind or things being written in stone are misguided on how things work. Provide me a better viable solution, or when we can work out one for ourselves, things will change. Change is a constant here and anyone who doesn't realize that hasn't been paying attention the past two years.