Being Banned for criticizing pbwiki staff???

Sara, Tim, KrissyMo: Thanks for enquiring. I wrote the blog post about Get Satisfaction's decision to ban our first user, which hopefully helps to explain what happened to the anonymous user who calls himself Guy Fawkes. I would be happy to expound a bit further if it helps, and I am always open to answering your questions, no matter what the subject may be.

Let me first say that we avoided banning the person who goes under the pseudonym of Guy Fawkes for a very long time -- as long as we could. We had numerous exchanges with him in an attempt to get him to stop harassing PBWiki employees and PBWiki customers. Some of those exchanges are in our own section of Get Satisfaction, and we have catalogued much of the content from this user, as well as the complaints from other PBWiki customers. My hope is that you do not get the impression that we took this step lightly.

As I say, we had a number of conversations and exchanges with this user. At one point, there was even a phone conversation that we hoped would prove to be fruitful, but each time he went back to the same pattern of mean-spirited dialogue. We ultimately came to the conclusion -- after many months and instances of him clearly ignoring our community guidelines -- that we had to remove his account in the interest of the greater community.

Since we removed his account last week, he keeps attempting to create multiple accounts to get around our community guidelines. I want to be clear about one thing in particular: We strongly uphold our community guidelines and the Customer-Company Pact, and we won't allow people to continually harass other members of Get Satisfaction. As you see in this conversation, he has managed to create yet another account, and I may need to remove it, and we may have to proceed with even stronger steps at blocking him.

To speak to the point about deletion of user content: I did remove posts that were created by these additional accounts, and during that process, I did remove another user's comment that was attached to these posts. This was an accident on my part, and we've changed the way our tools work so that that particular accident won't happen again. My goal isn't to sweep anything under the rug, but simply to enforce our guidelines.

I agree that some of his posts were very useful. Frankly, I'm sorry that he didn't want to stick around and use all that brainpower to help out, but we gave very clear warnings and followed our own internal steps about dealing with trolls. I believe we did as much as we could to avoid the ban, and I firmly stand behind the decision.

Please call on me if you want to know more, and, as always, you can let me know what you think. I'm always here to answer your questions, and I'll understand if you disagree with my decision, but I sincerely hope you'll end up feeling good about participating on Get Satisfaction.

As an additional note: I have removed this banned account's reply, so his reply is missing in this conversation. For full disclosure: I am pasting in this comment that was made to his reply:

"I went and read the blog entry... very sorry to hear that Guy.. I think you've provided some good solutions here that even the official representatives would have trouble coming up with. – Tim"

Well handled Eric.
Even though I had not encountered any posts from Mr Troll, I have witnessed first hand great harm done to forums where certain individuals have an axe to grind...what's needed then is a very big hammer!
Keep up the good work guys.

Wow, that's weak. Banning a user that consistently was able to point out flaws and offer solutions because some staff got their feelings hurt? I generally found Guy Fawkes' advice in the get satisfaction forums to be practical and useful, in direct opposition to most pbwiki staff advice. Staff tended to answer by saying "e-mail us directly". Well, I wouldn't be using the forums if I wanted answers via e-mail. The reason I like wiki's is for the collaboration - the same thing I like about solving problem in forums. You've just managed to remove one of the few people that I trusted to be able to help solve problems in a way that anyone could understand and apply to their own situation. Good thing I stopped bothering with get satisfaction weeks ago anyway.

By the way, I just realized that there is another forum out there to help with pbwiki questions: http://pbwidget.freeforums.org/index.php. Looks like Guy Fawkes started it as a discussion of the old Widget Library which got tougher to use in V.2, but I bet the people there will answer more general questions too.