But it's not your board. If the mods never find out about it, that's one thing; but if we get a complaint that someone is sending PMs that violate board rules, then it's another matter entirely.

As far as my understanding goes you can be as 'offensive' as you want in a PM as long as the other member doesn't find anything you are saying offensive.
If 2 people can use 'swear' words in a conversation that no-one else will hear and niether of them find it offensive then that's fine.
The problem lie within knowing that the other individual does or doesn't find it offensive.

It's kinda like the workplace harasment deal. Some people don't like to be hugged.
I find it safe to convey myself in a decent manner and try not to offend people while still holding to my own values.

You may have noticed the inverted commas use in my post as I've known people who can be more offesive without ever swearing.
I think the mose offensive thing I've heard is the two words 'Those people'
So let's just try to get along.
And personally if I do offend anyone feel free to let me know and I'll try to take your feelings into consideration.

I didn't see the really bad posts of Studmuffin, and didn't know he was PMing people, so I don't really know if I would personally consider what he did worth of a ban.

But I will say, even though he annoyed me, it was nice to have an outspoken conservative on the board for once. The other outspoken conservatives tend to give up and stop being outspoken after a while (Salamander), probably because so much of the board population treats their dissenting views as unwelcome.

He should have been less of a punk about it, and like I said I don't know how abusive his PMs to people were, but I would have favored a temporary ban over a permanent one.

You have to realize that the really offensive posts people make are often removed before everyone sees them. We gave him many opportunities to follow the community standards before we started handing out warnings. He was also given the opportunity to contact me by email to ask for his ban to be temporary, he did not.

He was that guy with the cartoon holding guns as his av, right? Yeah, he rubbed me the wrong way from the very few posts of his I saw. This community does NOT ban lightly, that's something I can say from 5+ years experience, but he just struck me as someone who wasn't sticking around for very long.

he actually just made a reappearance... we banned THAT ID as well.

He probably came by and saw we haven't talked about him for over a month. I don't want to give him any more attention, I actually meant to lock this thread earlier today so I am going to close this thread now.