GoT

I definitely want to preface this whole post with the fact that I do not condone theft in the form of intellectual property, coding, edits, etc. but the whole spiel people posted about passwords in the rules and rules in general in peeves of the rp just got me thinking:

I know a big rule in basically all rp communities is stealing, whether it be code, graphics, characters, etc. is not tolerated in the slightest. however, what exactly is a suitable punishment? at most, you just kick the member off of your site permanently in the form of banning their ip/email or whatever, but if they really want to, they can come back with a vpn or something. and if you catch them, so what? they'll just move to another site and repeat the same cycle. yes, I know, the rp community (especially animanga) is only so big, but that doesn't stop a lot of people. and everyone likes to play the rule of thumb of 'innocent until proven guilty' because people are afraid of confrontation.

then poses the issue of informing the community of a potential thief: it's merely hearsay with no actual proof because often, the proof is deleted or archived. on top of that, it's a conversation of how the theft happened in the past so who is to say that the person in question may steal again? furthermore, it's deemed inappropriate because it borders the line of vigilantism. sure there's a lot of hypotheticals and generalizations in this statement but it's more or less a thought of what more can you do other than give the person a slap on the wrist? because that's basically what banning someone from a site is imo. it doesn't really teach them anything in the long run because as I've found with rulebreakers I've encountered time and time again, they still repeat the same behaviors.

-- with that in mind, does banning really solve any site problems? or does it just prolong the inevitable of the problem surfacing again? this doesn't just go into theft, but it funnels into misconduct, harassment, crass behavior; the problem just leaves your site, not the community as a whole. not that it's one site's prerogative to protect and potentially gatekeep the community. but it's really just some food for thought.