This thread is to inform you of a recent action taken by the administration team, in an effort to increase the transparency of staff activity and provide accountability for the decision.
It has always been the policy of the Org that, regardless of the intrusiveness of governments and corporations, this forum would ensure privacy remained sacred; if you wanted to talk to someone in confidence about your belief that Andres wears underpants on his head, shoves pencils up his nose and spouts "wibble" everywhere he goes, then you could do so without your discussion being revealed. It is not Org policy to check private messages unless unique circumstances demand it or a user has given permission to do so, the latter having happened a few times in the past.
Unfortunately, such unique circumstances arose when a permabanned member continued their attempts to circumvent said ban; over the course of this person's absence from the Org, staff have had to delete countless alt accounts and attempts to block IPs have been futile when the person simply moves to another IP or we're unable to block it because other Orgahs have visited from those locations too.
The latest attempt to circumvent the ban came in the form of the banned member assuming the active profile of a family member and continuing to post; while the staff had their suspicions and even reset the password. the perpetrator continued to use the account, even responding to our emails in a manner we just knew was not that of the original account owner. However we had lacked real proof and, after a lengthy staff discussion, the decision was made to read the latest private messages sent from the account, whereby absolute proof of the user's identity was discovered and the account was subsequently suspended.
While there is no great comfort in having to resort to such methods, I would readily advocate their use again if the same circumstances arose; this particular member in question is not welcome here anymore and the community is better off without them, and I would take any action that ensure their permanent ban remains just that.
It should be added that the family member in question can reactivate their account if and when they can confirm that both the account and the email address registered to it are no longer accessible by the permabanned member.
Bookmarks