Hi everybody. We've been getting a steady stream of questions about this one particular topic, so I thought I'd clear some things up on a recent decision we've made.

For the underinformed, we decided late March to ban Richard Lewis' account (which he has since deleted) from the subreddit. We banned him for sustained abusive behavior after having warned him, warned him again, temp banned him, warned him again, which all finally resorted to a permaban. That permaban led to a series of retaliatory articles from Richard about the subreddit, all of which we allowed. We were committed to the idea that we had banned Richard, not his content.

However, as time went on, it was clear that Richard was intent on using twitter to send brigades to the subreddit to disrupt and cheat the vote system by downvoting negative views of Richard and upvoting positive views. He has also specifically targeted several individual moderators and redditors in an attempt to harass them, leading at least one redditor to delete his account shortly after having his comment brigaded.

Because of these two things, we have escalated our initial account ban to a ban on all Richard Lewis content. His youtube channel, his articles, his twitch, and his twitter are no longer welcome in this subreddit. We will also not allow any rehosted content from this individual. If we see users making a habit of trying to work around this ban, we will ban them. Fair warning.

As people are likely to want to see some evidence for what led to this escalation, here is some:

https://twitter.com/RLewisReports/status/590212097985945601

We gave the same reason to everyone else who posted their reaction to the drama. "Keep reactions and opinions in the comment section because allowing everyone and their best friend's reaction to the situation is going to flood the subreddit." Yet when that was linked on to his Twitter a lot of users began commenting on it and down voting this response alone, not the other removals we made that day. Many of the people responding to the comment were familiar faces that made a habit of commenting on Mr. Lewis' directly linked comments. That behavior is brigading, and the admins have officially warned other prominent figures for that behavior in the past.

https://twitter.com/RLewisReports/status/588049787628421120

This tweet led the OP to delete his account, demonstrating harm on the users in this subreddit.

https://twitter.com/RLewisReports/status/585917274051244033

After urging people to review the history of one particular user, this user's interactions became defined by some familiar faces we've come to associate with Richard's twitter followers. (It isn't too hard to figure out. Find a comment string with some of them involved and strange vote totals. Check twitter for a richard lewis tweet. Find tweet. Wash, rinse, repeat.)

https://twitter.com/RLewisReports/status/590592670126452736

I can see three things with this interaction. Richard tweets the user's comment. Then the user starts getting harassed. Finally, the user deletes their account.

Richard's twitter feed is full of other examples that I haven't included, many of which are focused exclusively on trying to drum up anger at the moderating team. His behavior is sustained, intentional, and malicious. It is not only vote manipulation, but it is also targeted harassment of redditors.

To be clear: TheDailyDot's other league-related content will not be impacted by this content ban. We are banning all of Richard Lewis' content only.

Please keep comments, concerns, questions, and criticisms civil. We like disagreement, but we don't like abuse.

Thanks for understanding and have a good night.