You know what Faringdon? You've been banned from this forum before, and you're banned again.
At best, you contribute nothing meaningful.
As someone who has tried to help Faringdon and tried to take their questions at face value, I took a hard look at their
posts (a couple of hundred most recent ones), plus because it started to get pretty repetitive, the
ones thanked by others over the last couple of years.
I cannot agree to "
nothing meaningful", but the signal-to-noise ratio
is horribly low, reminding me of
Albert Bernstein's Emotional Vampires in an online interaction scenario; a variant of the used-car salesmen type, or perhaps "you need to do my homework for me because I've got better more important things to do", who never remembers a previously given advice after the moment it was applied has passed.
I am not a psychologist, but having had to learn social skills the hard way myself, I don't think they are intentionally so, but definitely in need of adjusting the way they communicate. A proper mutually beneficial interaction is a give-and-take –– not so much between exact pairs of individuals, but an individual and the community. When someone just takes and takes and asks questions rarely really engaging in the ensuing discussion, just reading the responses, and even more rarely trying to help others in turn, they do become a burden on the community. (This is what I fear myself; being
useful is what brings me joy here, but I have my own set of faults causing friction here.)
The solution exists: one needs to adjust the way they communicate with others. It is unreasonable to expect everyone else conform to your needs. If one understands feedback mechanisms and basic scientific principles, they can experiment and find what changes in their communication style they can do and maintain that will yield positive results. And there are books and therapists specialized in this kind of thing, too. Unfortunately, I do not see any such effort on Faringdon's part.
Now I get why people use pen names here. Never thought about the companies that deal with sensitive issues.
For me, it is a tool, reminding me that others do not respond to my person, but to my output and output style. My output I can change; my person I cannot.
In that sense, it is not really Faringdon the human person that is banned; it is the member Faringdon due to their difficult communications patterns and styles that the moderators just cannot reasonably sustain/allow on this forum. In the past, Dave and the moderators have allowed such "reformed" members back in under new pseudonyms – including in Faringdon's own case before! –, exactly because it really is that and not anything personal per se. I find it important to understand this, and not consider the situation from an emotional perspective.