Hey KGs, serious questions here:
What actions will get a user banned?
What is the process/procedure to banning?
How does one avoid being banned?
I logged on and noticed that several well-liked members of this community had been banned yesterday. In the past you had told your users that there was a procedure in place where users would be sent "warnings" via PMs about behavior that violated the TOS. Five warnings and you would be banned. This seemed fair and reasonable to me. If you got a warning, you could amend your future actions to conform with the rules that you had broken.
I understand that your TOS reserve the right for you to ban anyone for any reason you see fit. What I don't understand is why you even wasted time writing the TOS if ultimately you will ban users for any reason and without warning (for the record, thirty minutes notice is not a warning). Seriously, why did you have me read a rather long TOS outlining what I can and can't do on the forums if you aren't going to bother following through with your own protocols?
To my knowledge, these members did nothing that violated the TOS. There's nothing in the TOS about brutal honesty or negativity. I know, I reread them this morning (BTW tortious is spelled with an "i"). If you want to add this to them, by all means do so, especially if you're going to ban people over it. If I am wrong and there were posts that violated the TOS, please correct me. I'd love to see an example of one of their posts that violated the TOS. In fact, I think it would be helpful if you did this anyways. The TOS are so vague that it's hard for users to know what is acceptable and not acceptable. If you gave us examples of the types of posts that violate the TOS, users would be able to comply with them better. By the way when you removed everyone's flags last week (including the users you banned yesterday), you basically told us that none of these flags violated the TOS. That was a pretty deceptive and unfair thing to do if you were later going to ban users for these posts.
Since there are very reasonable, rational, and logical ways to ensure that users conform with the TOS, but you chose to ban them in the least transparent way, I can only guess there were other reasons for the banning. I'm not a mind-reader, but I'm imagine their suggestions to keep costs down, not follow the poor etiquette advice that you publish, and discouraging other users from using some of the services that TK offers had something to do with it. You said that you had received over 40 complaints about these users. Why didn't you reach out to these users and send them official warnings based on these complaints if these complaints were something you found to be serious? Sending a PM to a user about their behavior is a lot faster than having "meetings" with "staff" about a series of posts.
I could go on to discuss how your decision to ban these users is probably bad for business since many users are drawn to TK over other wedding websites BECAUSE of the blunt advice that is offered here, but you've already made your decision and these users likely wouldn't come back even if you asked them to. All I ask is that you answer the questions I asked at the beginning of this post so that other users can conform with the TOS.