I guess I've always looked at websites like houses. Step in one, and the owner can tell you to get out, for any reason.
Maybe the owner wants you to juggle bananas while balancing on a walrus as a communist panda with chainsaw arms breaths fire and attempts to make a mid-air bananas foster. Maybe they just want you to obey rules which you think are asinine.
But you stepped in, so if they don't want you there, they have any and every reason to tell you to leave. If that's the case, why do you want to be there?
That's fine and all. If they want me to leave their 'house' it's their business. However, going about telling the rest of the guests that the person is a convicted criminal when they are not and posting their picture on a wall for everyone to see, is really going beyond their boundaries. It doesn't however, mean that they are reasonable, which is what everyone on this thread is saying.
We certainly don't want to be there, but the fact that they have a complete monopoly on all the available mods out there doesn't exactly give us a choice.
An analogy to add to yours, would be that they have the
ONLY house in the entire world that has the facilities to meet up with other people to share your products. In this case, the house is more like a marketplace. However, the host requires you to
'juggle bananas while balancing on a walrus as a communist panda with chainsaw arms breaths fire and attempts to make a mid-air bananas foster'.
Some people can do the trick just fine, then you have people (like me) who accidentally drop the bananas because we made a mistake and aren't good at acrobatics and
not because we don't want to do it.
So the owner kicks the person out, calls them criminals, and in addition to that, assumes ownership of their products (mods) when it technically doesn't belong to the admins to begin with (and it's not stated anywhere in their rules that they automatically assume ownership of your mods if you are banned). This is where your analogy to the real world kinda falls apart, because even in the real world, you can't simply ask a salesman to leave his products behind to your ownership merely because he's was standing in your house (unless you've paid for it of course).
There are limits to what you can do to people in the real world for stepping in your territory and it's the same reason why asking people to juggle bananas on a panda doesn't exist in the real world.
Analogies aside though, you are under the assumption that most of the people banned are at fault for somehow disrupting the community or generally trying to do something bad. That is not the case and my post above has explained that the admins are careful to 'censor' the actual legitimate claims while making the illegitimate ones public. Which keeps the user base in relative ignorance.
In my case, it has something to do with the content of my mod containing copyright infringing material. Which I can accept is a mistake, but it's not something I intentionally wanted to do to just so that I can cause trouble. Hence why I believe the ban and the public smearing, is excessive.
The problem is, the site places the responsibility of recognizing copyrighted materials firmly on the modders rather than on the admins who should be explaining in detail what they allow or disallow on a single thread that is easy to read and follow. Making mods based on a common-sense approach to copyright laws can only take you so far, as copyrights itself is a very complex subject.
Modders like me don't come pre-programmed with legal expertise and we certainly aren't lawyers. New modders are very likely going to create mods that mistakenly contain material which they are not aware as copyrighted. Calling us idiots and banning us is really pushing it, but calling us deliberate pirates and posting our names on the site to be mocked, is overstepping their responsibilities as admins.