[Mod Voice on]
I don't approve of banning posters for being harsh on the team. If this site had an ignore button like almost every other site I've ever been to it wouldn't be a problem. Ignore the poster you want, he disappears from your feed. Easy peazy.
This site
has an ignore feature; it just doesn't have an ignore "button." And the ignore feature has
never been considered the solution to trash behavior; this has always been a moderated message board, since the very beginning, and it's never been policy to allow anyone unrestricted access to pollute the message board, and then tell everyone who has a problem with it, "Well, just put him on ignore, if you don't like it!" The ignore feature was never meant to serve as some kind of S.E.P. field, so that the Duke Nukems and Hoggish Greedlys of the world could have a consequence-free space to spread their particular brand of "criticism".
And, you're also creating a false narrative: nobody was banned for being "harsh" on the team. But, I'll get back to that in a minute...
Instead the site has become so structured and so squeaky clean that it's lost its kind of free flowing feel it use to have. Hey, I get it. The powers that be will do as they seem fit. Your site, your rules. However, There will be consequences, as in people just bailing and going elsewhere. I've seen sites go from lots of traffic to nothing and it is extremly depressing.
Your sense of the history of this message board is... incomplete. We've already had many of our best posters 'bail'. At least twice. They didn't go elsewhere, though, they just quit message boarding. There have already been multiple exoduses (Exodi? Whatever the word is...) from this message board, the most recent of which may have preceded your arrival here.
I can understand why somebody who joined in 2006 might think that how it was then was better, but those of us who were around before the crash, and remember how the board was before the last Great Schism (Webber trade) know differently: most of the grownups left the board after the
last base breaker (read: before 2006), and the site became overrun by the type of loud, outspoken people who created the atmosphere that you seem to think of as "free flowing." Since then, it has been a never-ending fight against the current to regain equilibrium, and now we are faced with another Broken Base situation. And, just like before, the people who are leaving aren't the ones who are causing the problems, they aren't, for the most part, the loud, obnoxious ones. The people who are leaving are the more moderate, conflict-averse posters, whom don't want to read through hundreds of posts trashing the players and/or the coach and/or management, and/or ownership, and/or other posters, but aren't willing to complain about it out loud, or don't want to enter the fray and "fight back," simply because they don't think that the juice is worth the squeeze on that particular exercise. Why fight, when you can walk away, you know?
It seems like people who wish that KingsFans.com were more "free flowing," would prefer if this place were more like Reddit, or 4Chan. But, we've never been like that, and we've never wanted to be like that. The problem isn't that the board is too "squeaky clean," the problem is that the more moderate adults, people who knew how to be critical without being jerks, were run off by the ALL-CAPS-WALL-OF-TEXT types. If you don't know how, or are otherwise unwilling to be "harsh," without going on virulent text screeds, this is probably not the place for you. So, a few of those types get run out the paint... that's not a great loss. And, if we run a few more of them out the paint, that is not going to make this a worse place to be, in the long run.
[Mod Voice off]