[nhil] - [Abuse of Service on our Forums]

[nhil]

SS14 account: nhil
Character name: Clayton Sheets.
Type of Ban: Game ban (?)
Date of Ban and Duration: Applied on: 6/7/2022. Ban duration: Permanent
Reason for Ban: "Abuse of service on our forums"
Server you were playing on when banned: Wizard's Den Lizard [US West]
Your side of the story:  Before the ban, I had just gotten back from going to the bathroom in the middle of a round on waystation when I received an ahelp which should included in the attached files. I believe that this ban is because I refreshed my profile page a large number of times after I noticed that the visit count went up after each refresh, which upon noticing, decided to take advantage of to make the profile visits on my page grow. 

Why you think you should be unbanned: Having reviewed the rules several times as of writing this appeal, I could only conclude that I may have violated either the 3rd rule or 2nd rule, though for the 2nd rule it states "No griefing, spamming or intentionally derailing discussions" and I have not even posted or commented on anything up until the composition of this appeal, so I'm unsure of both how blurred the lines are in consideration to spamming refresh on a page. And as for the possible 3rd rule violation, my profile image is a little stickman lighting themself on fire, so I could assume that would be taken as a form of NSFW, though again, that rule is also in regards to discussions, which again, I have not commented or made any posts of my own. I suppose I am just very confused about the whole ban reason in general though, and I'd say the admin that I assumed banned me (the one that sent me the ahelp message) failed to properly address what I actually did in the moment, ignoring my requests to know what I had done wrong to get at least some clarification. I do understand that being able to artificially inflate the profile view count is almost certainly NOT an intended feature of the website and I probably should've left it alone, though it is a feature that can be disabled, so I don't see why a simple message telling me to disable it because it's not an accurate representation wouldn't have sufficed, same for the profile image. I am sorry if I truly broke any of the forum rules, and will remedy the two things I addressed immediately after posting this appeal. 

Anything else we should know: I don't exactly know if this is relevant, but I initially signed up on the forums on 6/5 because I wanted to appeal another ban I had gotten for "metacomming" that I also believed was unjust, however since it was only a day long I decided not to bother appealing. It was around that time I realized that refreshing the page increased the profile view count and decided to spend a little bit making the number rise. My only other activity on the forum was reading the ban appeals of other players both on 6/5 and in the afternoon of 6/6. This is technically my second offense, though I'm of the opinion that I am not guilty of at least the first one, and since this is my second offense, I can understand that the punishment would be more significant. However, from one day to permanent seems like an absurd jump, especially considering I fondly recall appeals from people who have been banned 3+ times and still have access. I do have two questions to whichever admin/moderator reviews this, being: 1) How come I was banned on the game if the ban is forum related? Sorry if that seems ignorant, but I'd expect to be removed from both or had it flipped. And 2) If this happened a day ago, why did the punishment take until today? Finally, if there is anything here that needs clarification in this post, I am more than happy to reply to the best of my ability, since it is now 1:40 am as of writing this sentence, I'm sure my writing and comprehension abilities are not at 100%. Also, I realize that after proofreading my "Why you think you should be unbanned" portion of this appeal, it is not exactly all me saying why I should be unbanned, I'd like to say that that is mostly because of the ambiguity of the actual ban reason and the lack of communication, which left me in a difficult place trying to actually formulate a single clear reason.

Thank you, and sorry if you had to read through that whole mess, I have a very bad tendency to write a lot in situations like these where I have to defend myself.

[moony]

Flooding my connection logs has not won you any favors. Wait a week. Denied.