Turns out that you can be banned from outpost even when you no longer use it.

[Heated Bread]

Two main reasons:

1) If he ever gets back into trading, appealing the ban means several hurdles and hoops to jump through which will take time.

2) The stigma of a ban. If someone's got a ban, even for the most frivolous reasons, there will be people out there that will judge him (both openly and internally) for it, and/or just outright refuse to associate with him.

[Neobenedict]

Yes it is reasonable, in my opinion.  I don't see why anyone would want to have a private profile, unless they were trying to hide something, at which point its obvious.

If I'm not trading (ie. quit) I will set my profile to friends only. There is no reason to have a public profile unless you want people adding you and all that.

[E-Arkham]

I think you should verify that this is actually the case from someone OTHER than Blue Screen of Death. Without name calling, BSoD is....uh, let's just say "a little overzealous in his viewpoints", whether it's outpost or tf2wh. His might not be an opinion shared with the site owners or top admins.

[Heated Bread]

I think you should verify that this is actually the case from someone OTHER than Blue Screen of Death. Without name calling, BSoD is....uh, let's just say "a little overzealous in his viewpoints", whether it's outpost or tf2wh. His might not be an opinion shared with the site owners or top admins.

 

Thanks for the tip.

 

So other than posting another thread in the group discussions (which I think would likely be considered inappropriate after he already closed the first one), I don't know how to contact anybody about it.  Aside from directly adding admins on steam, that is.  I don't think that would go over too well either.  They all probably get loads of adds a day.  Back when outpost was relatively new, it's something that I would have felt more comfortable doing.

 

The topic is there in the official steam group for the other admins to see if they want to do/say something about it.  Considering that nobody has stepped forward, I think his view is either in line with theirs or nobody is willing to challenge it.  So I don't think it's necessary to get in touch with any of the other admins, and as I said, I don't think such attempts would be received well.

 

But again, thanks.  I do appreciate it.  I'm at my daily limit of likes to give for today.

[E-Arkham]

The topic is there in the official steam group for the other admins to see if they want to do/say something about it.  Considering that nobody has stepped forward, I think his view is either in line with theirs or nobody is willing to challenge it.  So I don't think it's necessary to get in touch with any of the other admins, and as I said, I don't think such attempts would be received well.

It could be that they just don't read it closely, or at all. I imagine those forums get tiresome extremely fast, with the same questions, trolls, nonsense, etc being said over and over again. So why bother reading it if that's what moderators are meant to clean up?

 

I have no ideas on how to contact someone else higher up, but my view is that banning people who don't use outpost is... foolish at best.

 

It generates more work for their mods, either in the form of finding accounts out of the millions of steam users to pro-actively ban, or in the form of dealing with appeals by people coming to outpost for the first time to find that they're already banned.

 

It simply does not make sense for a website to do, not from a new user perspective, not from a workload perspective, and not from a traffic perspective. That makes me think it's being done by only one or two mods who are either doing this out of pettiness or because they're not thinking things through.

 

That, or they're purposely wanting to cull users.

[Heated Bread]

It generates more work for their mods, either in the form of finding accounts out of the millions of steam users to pro-actively ban, or in the form of dealing with appeals by people coming to outpost for the first time to find that they're already banned.

 

I want to clear this up: I'm like 99.99999999% positive that they don't ban people before they've even used the site for the first time.  It's not like they're just going out of their way to find random private backpacks to ban.  In fact, I'm willing to believe that in the majority of cases, bans are handed out based on reports filed through the site by other users.

[E-Arkham]

I want to clear this up: I'm like 99.99999999% positive that they don't ban people before they've even used the site for the first time.  It's not like they're just going out of their way to find random private backpacks to ban.  In fact, I'm willing to believe that in the majority of cases, bans are handed out based on reports filed through the site by other users.

My bad! I must have misread.

 

Still, my opinion stands -- if someone doesn't have any active trades on outpost, there's very little point to banning them for a private backpack as it only generates more work for the mods. I believe you're right, in that the bans are handed out based on reports. I know I've reported a couple of people even, but in those cases they always had active trades up (and I was annoyed that I couldn't check to make sure the item was still in the backpack).

[Heated Bread]

Still, my opinion stands -- if someone doesn't have any active trades on outpost, there's very little point to banning them for a private backpack as it only generates more work for the mods. I believe you're right, in that the bans are handed out based on reports. I know I've reported a couple of people even, but in those cases they always had active trades up (and I was annoyed that I couldn't check to make sure the item was still in the backpack).

 

I agree 100%; that's how I think things should be handled, and that's how I thought they actually are handled.  But evidently it's not entirely correct, and someone can be banned even if they're not actively using the site and have no open trades. 

 

...at least according to Blue Screen.