Single post in Moderation Warning before Issuing Punishments

@Ethereal Moth The contest strike you received was separate from the warning for distributing specials in your type race thread. Distributing specials does lead to an uptick of unnecessary posts that are only relevant to the two users involved and not to the rest of the team. Due to this, it is considered spam because the same action can be accomplished in PMs. It is also limited to one post per person to prevent offering specials every time one is hatched. As an example - if I hatched 20 specials in a type race and made a post giving away each special, that is 2 pages of thread spam, 40 notifications (posting and claiming) that would be useless to most other users subscribed of offerings and claims. The issue at hand was the way the specials were distributed. Which was requiring a user to answer a question to receive a special. That leads to potential additional spam, however the bigger issue is having a user complete X to receive Y is a 'contest'. Contest strikes are taken extremely seriously. This is with good reason, there have been instances in the past of users utilising contests to scam others and receive personal gain. That is certainly not what you had intended, but it's for that reason that any sort of contests being held outside the moderated contest forums receive such a harsh punishment. It is to prevent potential abuse, additionally, contests not in the proper forums cannot be validated for legitimacy. @insanemandii What you state happened is, as far as I am aware, not what occurred. The way that it was set forward to be handled (and was, to my knowledge) was that users who had the issue-content in their trainer cards received warnings and the content was removed. If there were additional journal posts, links to others' journal posts, or the issue-content returned, for instance, after removal then an account lock was placed. If any slipped through the cracks and were not handled according to what was just said, then they were indeed mishandled and I would be grateful to know of such situations via. PM (as to not break our rules). As an additional bit of information - Account locks are utilised, a majority of the time, to prompt a conversation in the Support Centre when a situation is serious enough to warrant that, or when a user doesn't take the warning seriously and proceeds to either break the rule again or, indeed, doesn't stop breaking the rule. Unlike PMs, a temporary site lock cannot be avoided or accidentally missed or forgotten - when genuinely missed or such, a temporary site lock should not last very long at all. That all said, the event you spoke of did require such conversations with those involved who escalated the issue due to the severity (whether 'escalated' enough off the initial finding (meaning them being reported or a staff member coming across the content) or thereafter). I am aware that you have both been given direction towards me to discuss such things and neither of you have done so. This is me re-stating that direction. My PMs are open and I am quite happy to talk with people on Discord or some such, presuming other peoples' comfort with that, of course. I also want to offer a reminder that discussing other peoples' locks is against the rules. If you want clarity on things, or to ask questions about things that perhaps you have been told, then by all means - feel free to talk to me and ask me through the appropriate channels. With that, I am going to lock this thread and move it to complete, as the requested course of action is - to both my knowledge and that of the other staff members - how things are already handled. That said, I will be taking the time to investigate and verify this, just to be sure of my claims. Thank you, and I hope that you do indeed choose to discuss this with me further.