While I personally don’t mind ban requests being open to comment on, they are more often than not the breeding ground for arguments based on whether the ban request itself is justified, which isn’t the players’ decision. Telling the requester to “just mute” a mic spammer accomplishes nothing and doesn’t change the fact that the player(s) in question is/are breaking the rules.
My suggestion is to set the permissions in that specific subforum to that anyone can post but only admins can reply to threads. If that can’t work, institute a bot that deletes replies that are not made by admins.
I also think this would be a good idea, mainly to stop potential arguments, but I can also see the need for them to be open so that users who were there could add on to the ban reports by testifying for or against the banned individual in question,
Personally I think having a rule against people only replying if they were there will just create more moderation work, as people could easily break that rule and we don’t see that many ban reports anyway.
I’ve always known that reports are kinda just between the admins and the reporter, and ban appeals are between the banned and the admins. In the old GMod Tower forums, people were allowed to post in the ban reports thread but everyone there knew that it wasn’t the place to have a discussion so nobody posted.
I wonder what changed so that people began posting in the reports again?
