So, should icopress be banned for promoting mixers? I don't think that will happen because famous members won't get banned easily. The rules here only apply to ordinary and low-ranking members.
This also happened to Jolly where he abused the trust system but was still considered a trusted member. I wonder, are many members afraid of jolly?
Those are two separate issues--getting banned from the forum and the trust system. The former absolutely could happen in icopress's case. I don't believe for a minute that he's got such influence in Theymos's eyes that he'd get special treatment. I've seen some long-time members get banned before (though of the two that I remember, one was later reversed after the community stood up for him, and the other was a temp ban). The trust system isn't moderated; that's a community thing.
I excluded JollyGood from my trust list a while back because of all the questionable or straight-up bad feedbacks he'd handed out. But yeah, other members might have trouble with conflict.
And privately I work for him in another forum and I have not received any PM, although if what you say is true, he could have sent it only to people in this forum, which I doubt.
He didn't PM me about revising my trust list either, though I can't be certain he didn't PM anyone else.
According to what I understood from his post, he was trying to inform them that they will receive a PM from him informing them that they had been moved to different campaigns, after which they would change signatures.
And he did do that, so you're probably correct.
Besides, people in DT should know that including or excluding people from their trust lists should be done based on the feedback they leave and their trust lists, not on the opinions they express about mixers.
I would add that everyone should be using inclusions/exclusions to reflect their trust of other members' feedbacks and not for any other reason. That's the way Theymos wants it last I heard, though obviously he doesn't enforce anything to do with trust, so the whole system is a chaotic mess that winds up being a drama-generating machine going full tilt sometimes. In this particular case, I don't think OP should have been excluded from anyone's trust list based on his/her opinions about Jambler, mixers, icopress, or anything of the sort.