>>>I have just noticed this. As a PUTM, I enjoy the benefit of searching the archives. It seems I cannot search for these banned members. This to me means a lot of content (good or bad) is out of my reach, other than blindly stumbling upon a thread where they participated.
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>>>When did this change occur? And for what reason?
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>>This has always been like that since the first banisment procedures we applied. The reason is that we need to protect the individuals being banned. Their account information should not be visible anymore and such.
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>>But, this only relates to the members area. You can still have access to all messages posted on the Universal Thread when searching the messages area.
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>The other day I was trying to get to the message (or contributions) of a person who I believe passed away and I got the message something to the effect "no such member". I was actually looking at his post in the download area and there were lists of other contributions but I could not get to them.

I think you probably made a mistake. The member could not be deleted if he/she created some content. Only fake members with no messages and contributions could be deleted.