Another Rule you should follow.
I see you're posting outside of Meta. You shouldn't pm anyone or post outside meta if one of your accounts is banned.
25. Ban evasion (using or creating accounts while one of your accounts is banned) is not allowed.
Normally I wouldn't bother with this but if we are going to come here and
shit pile on a guy - for really doing something he felt was in line with his/the original experience on this forum. Let's at least read the thread. If you had bothered to do that instead of investigating first, you might have noticed they had been made aware of this and would cease.
P.S. I've also been informed that I'm not supposed to 'talk' outside of this ban appeal topic (if that's what it is classified as) so aside from my other two posts made using this mobile account - I shall conform to the rules.
This forum is a community like any other, it's a simple fact about any group or organisation that operates in the public. Times change and so does what can be seen as acceptable. There are rules BitcoinFX is aware of them now. It's a shitty way to learn, when you were acting without malice and inline with what you thought was acceptable. It is howerver the responsibility of anyone to be sure they are aware of the rules anywhere they frequent.
I did laugh at the part about not having been told to read the rules after they had been created. Makes me think of a terms of service agreement when they update it. Any service generally gets you at login time or something similar forcing you to acknowledge you have read the rules/guidelines. I never thought of it before as they were established long before I got here, but wouldn't it have made sense back then to have mass PM'd the forums user base.
I knew I wasn't special when I checked the value of the free coins: $0.0notmuch. I was surprised though, to see a veteran user break forum rules like that.
I would argue all of us that did receive the PM were special in some way. There were 100, had BitcoinFX wanted to they could have sent out 100's of PM's or used fake accounts, we've seen it all here.
Now I'm not advocating for no punishment, but how many times in the past has BitcoinFX earned a ban or broken the rules? Spamming and trolling generally gets what a 7-14 day ban for first time offenders and then escalates upward if I'm not mistaken. Couldn't that have been the result here, all PM's scrubbed if necessary (though I would leave that up to individuals to delete), a warning/smaller ban and then call it a day.