All this talk of perma-banning offenders [GA's end 10/9 - 7pm EST]

Yes, there is a tl;dr at the bottom if you don’t want to read this
Yes I realize this will likely land me in a few blacklists
And yes, there is a giveaway hidden in here
For the past month or so I have seen a massive rise in the number of threads calling for perma-banning of anyone who commits anything against the rules. It just seems like everyone is up in arms over this. I can understand people’s frustration over un-activated gifts, regifted ones, and general rule breaking, but not the rampant hate that seems to be streaming everywhere. I don’t know if there have been more people committing these in the past while, which would explain the rise in threads, or if people are just flaring up, since I have not had this problem for a while.

The point of all of this is that I have been on the other side, and made mistakes. I’ve used SG for almost 2 years and when I started out I didn’t read the rules. Because I was an idiot, I ended up getting banned for unactivated wins & regifting and was threatened with a perma-ban. This was more than a year ago. I served my time, have been giving back to the community, and am now working my way from level 4 to 5.

I can understand the anger and frustration at some of these people, and know that the site has grown a lot in the past 2 years so now bots are a lot more prevalent. But we still have users who will make the same mistakes I did. We still have people who might stupidly try to make a profit from this site before realizing how wonderful the community can be.

What I ask is that you don’t think of these people as evil that needs to be removed from the site immediately. Don’t blacklist someone just because they have an unactivated win from over a year ago. Don’t give in to hating someone for a mistake they made when they still didn’t understand SG.

tl;dr – While there are malicious users, there should not be blanket perma-banned for everyone who makes one mistake. Don’t hate people just because they were stupid. They might end up giving back a lot more than they ever could have taken in the first place.