For what it's worth, I don't think a perma ban was necessary with newt. Perhaps he's been a nuisance most of the time, but it's not like he's posted illegal or offensive material. He's done a lot of small (at worst) annoying things. I haven't seen any activity that could be classified as harassment.

I do think drama is a healthy factor in every community and newt is one such person to create drama. I think he should be unbanned in a finite period of time shorter than a 100th of his remaining lifespan.

No. We're here to make games. If someone is getting in the way of that to the degree where multiple people are complaining about them, they're in the wrong.

The standards is allowed to be a little bit lower on the chat room

Knowing @newt as I do, banning him from the chats is like cutting off one of his hands

Of recent I significantly reduced my presence in the chat room (more to do with the fact that I couldn't mentally multi-task than any other reason), but reading through the post, I can see that @newt's behaviour that finally got him banned was just an extension (and more of) what i've witnessed.

I will say on the one hand he's one of the few (or many) that makes the chats lively (unlike boring me). On the other hand he pushes his luck too far many other times, but over all i think the accumulation of several little annoying things could cause people (and the mods) to snap, but I doubt it is ban worthy

I hope the mods to let him back

I do think drama is a healthy factor in every community

No. We're here to make games. If someone is getting in the way of that to the degree where multiple people are complaining about them, they're in the wrong.

Here as in the GDN forum proper? Then yes. Here as in the Chat? Relax. We're there to chat. Sometimes about game- or gamedev-related stuff or other times about any random thing we feel at the moment.

Now I'm not saying that newt hasn't been annoying and pushed the envelope far more than he should. But he shouldn't be permanently banned for what he did either. Cumulative or otherwise. It wasn't that serious.

A cooldown period is understandable. But perma-ban is taking it too far.

If people want to participate in Gamedev.net's chat channel then they need to respect the rules of the channel. We're not talking about an accident or a one-off event here. You don't get infinite lives when it comes to wasting our time and annoying other community members.

If you want to go with that analogy, then all he did was deplete his energy bar and lost 1 live.

No one is seriously asking that newt get the Konami code.

all he did was deplete his energy bar and lost 1 live

That's for the staff and mods to decide, not you, sorry.

Analogies and opinions are forbidden now? **sad**