Turn the clock back 20 years to QBF, do this, and you'd have an all out war on your hands. I'm glad to see things are a lot less dramatic these days. To help handle these types of matters, after Mac passed, I decided to make a non-public forum I called Quarantine. If some posts got out of hand, I'd just move those threads there. Everything was preserved, it just wasn't public anymore. If anyone said, "Hey Pete, I had something important in all that removed stuff!" Well, I could go in and retrieve it. Maybe call it Murphy's Law, but just by having that non-public forum, I was never asked to retrieve anything.
Forum owners vs regulars: Yeah, this is an age old problem. It boils down to you can't please all of the regulars all of the time, most of the time, well basically, any of the time. Every time you float an idea, especially multi-phased ones, you run an increased risk of community dissension. Push it too far, and you have factions, with no clear majority support from anybody. That never happened to me, because that wasn't my first rodeo. Hey, anybody knows to get real wisdom, you don't climb up a mountain, apparently you just keep attending rodeos. Anyway this reminds me of the old joke about a camel is a horse a committee put together.
Personally, I love living in a republic, but that's a hard way to run an online community. A full on authoritarian model was more forgiving, back in the day. If fell out of love, or out of favor, with one QBasic forum, you just bounced your ASCII to another one. That's just not possible these days; so, if [banned user] makes his way back to discuss QB64, post code, etc., I have no problem with that. I mean he didn't personally trash the hell out of someone, or threaten anyone, or did I miss something?
Pete