(January 9, 2014 at 4:33 am)Waratah Wrote: I have never known anyone being banned for trolling, spamming or flaming outside the forums, always from within.
I have. I provided one situation below where we have done this.
As Tiberius just said, sometimes we have searched for information externally as well - by using public information - and then we used that information "internally" (in this forum) only when necessary. Thus we may decide to search for external contents of suspicious members, but we won't "use" them against you in any ay until you start breaking the rules in this forum. That is my understanding of the rule "Your information is used internally only when necessary" as written in the privacy policy. Tiberius will correct me if I am wrong about this.
The policy doesn't say, "Your internal information is used internally only when necessary." It says, "Your information ..." so it could be both internal and external.
To prove this, here is one example where outside investigation was used against a member:
(August 1, 2012 at 7:17 pm)cato123 Wrote:
Upon seeing those links, the mods poked around in other sites to gather more knowledge about that poster, and later banned him:
Moderator Wrote:
But, again, an action was taken against that member (or we used the information internally) only because it was verified from our investigation that he was a spammer (i.e. he was copy-pasting a lot of stuff across different forums and not participating in discussions), which is against the rules of this forum. As Tiberius told you already, the only way you will get warned or banned is by breaking the rules of this forum, on this forum. We won't ever punish you unless you start breaking the rules in this forum.
