A couple of things strike me prima facae about dealing with this issue.
The first is that Skynyrd Fan contributes in many threads that others don't post in. All his posts are largely the same in terms of quality content size etc.
If all he was doing was ripping others off then all his contributions would be limited to those threads others are posting in. That they are not must give us pause for thought.
The second is that he is a major contributor who is also responsible enough to upkeep his posts & threads. If he is made aware of dead content he revives it quickly or removes it.
An offshoot of that is that the sheer weight of his contributions means the forum is now increasingly filled with dying content with no way to revive it.
Banning him from a forum he puts so much time and effort into to solve an issue that may or may not exist. That sstrikes me a bit like cutting one's schlong off to sort out stress related erectile dysfunction.
The third is my own view and it's simply this.
None of this content is proprietory. You can bitch and moan about who cropped cut or blew up what but at the end of the day the only people who can lay claim to any of this material as THEIRS are the director, the actors, the writers and the editors of the original work. Unless people suddenly have access to raw footage and multiple takes all anyone is doing here is cutting finished segments from existing finished and released works. EVERY crop cut or edit will show the same damned scenes and angles no matter what you do. Even whacking up levels lightness or audio doesn't make it "yours".
I know this is a view that many won't agree with. That's their perogative but based on a life of working in media professionally I can tell you it's wrong.
I would concede that it's bad form to take someone else' posted clip and piss around with that. If you want to claim something as your own edit you find the original media file and cut that. However so many clips on the net have been swapped, posted downloaded and shared so many times unless there's embedded meta there's no way to know who did what and when. Likelwise with accusations. There are opinions & allegations but no proof. You don't hang someone based on suspicion or personality clash.
Frankly each popular video listing in here has multiple posts of the same scenes. The files may vary in terms of size, resolution, duration and file host but in reality it's just multiple replications of the same thing. We don't know where they came from, when they were cut or by whom unless someone can guarantee they had an original stream, recording or disc they ripped & edited from. There's no getting away from that either.
Mods make decisions unilaterally all the time. In times past mods were draconian, arbitrary, bullying & passed judgement on a whim. I'd hoped we were past that time & had moved into a period of thought and sound judgement over kneejerk reaction to assumption. Clearly I was wrong.
Beyond intermittent contact - usually about a dead post - I have no knowledge of Skynyrd Fan at all. All I know of him is as I wrote in my previous post. However I do know from those intermittent contacts that he's an open friendly and co-operative chap who takes thoughts on board and is willing to compromise to make things run smoothly. I can't believe that he would not take reason on board nor discuss contructively if approached properly.
Perhaps what was needed here was an independent arbiter from higher up. But that's for the higher ups to consider.
BOC