Perry,

>...I've almost never agreed with anything David Stevenson has said on other then tech topics, and he appears to be in favor of some of these bannings.

To clarify... I'm not in favor of or against Kevin's banning -- that's none of my business from the standpoint of the owner of the site and his right to run it as he sees fit. Let me explain further.

I agree with many people here that Kevin has provided excellent tech support over the years to many people here, spending countless hours helping others. From that perspective, his loss of posting privileges is loss to the community and I'm sad that it happened. He has also participated in many interesting non-technical threads in a way that was fun and endeared him to many here. From that perspective, he will be missed.

Although I'm not a close friend of Whil and certainly don't consider myself part of some clique or tight group that includes him (he and I have not spoken in person, by phone or by email at all in the past several years), I have been disturbed by the eagerness with which some here (in the past and recently) have impugned his character publicly (what has he done for the community in the past year, etc). That's just bad behavior in my book, and I won't consider the loss of those types of posts as a bad thing.

However, none of us know Michel's reasons for banning Kevin, so any suggestion that it is unwarranted is just speculation. I'm sure that if there is some misunderstanding between Kevin and the UT over this incident and that his innocence can be proven to Michel's satisfaction, that Michel will do the right thing. The UT is not a democracy, however, and it has no inherent "right of free speech."

I think one lesson we could all benefit from (whether it turns out to have been related to this incident or not) is that we should put more time into being helpful and less time into provoking conflict. Light-hearted kidding around is fine -- tearing others down is not worth the effort.