Sean!
You should come back.
People should let you back.
Uh... right, so let me slip out of Delirium-esque mode.
The chatroom is something that we haven't really had to deal with, authority-wise, in PPC history. I think it's because the Wiki makes things really easy to find; in the past, the chatroom was only used when someone linked to it, pretty much at random, in the 'Board, and I only remember two or three times when there were more than four or five people in at once, and they were all relative oldbies and one of those was a conference on who should be nominated for a PG.
Anyway. It's like the Wiki. A new thing, and one for which we might have to have slightly different-from-the-Board rules.
I'm definitely with Sedri on the PGs not necessarily being the ones to ban and unban people-- for one, the only two PGs who are on the chat that often (off the top of my head; I can never think of the whole list) are Techno_Dann and Neshomeh. And they're not omnipresent-- for that matter, neither is July. It's a frustrating conundrum, since with the PPC getting more and more exposure lately, I don't feel comfortable just leaving it with no authority figures at all, like we (mostly) have on the 'Board.
Anyway. I disagree with perma-bans on general principle, except for people who really deserve them. In the past, the really twitch-worthy people kind of faded off the 'Board after a while, when they got the hints or made themselves so blatantlly trollish they couldn't stay. And I'd hope that'll happen in the chatroom-- but we can't really depend on it. So I think we should be patient with people, and issue a lot of warnings (yes, I know, there were), and if people come sneaking back in to notably NOT cause trouble, I think they shouldn't be publicly shamed for it.
So what we need, in short, is a compromise. PGs, on the 'Board, are here to grant permission for spin-offs, officially, and nothing else. But I think we're all kidding ourselves if we deny that their opinions have no clout, sway, or other sorts of weight synonyms. They should probably be -consulted- on a perma-ban. I don't know how that would work, outside of a 'Board-post, and that seems needlessly... spectacle-ish. Because we'd need transcripts to verify, or something, and it, just. That would get messy.
Yeah. All points raised have been valid; now we just need to find something that works for all parties, because I feel like this is going to keep coming up if we just ignore it.
(Again: I'm in favor of using bans VERY sparingly and with absolute leniency wherever possible. Anyway. Yeah. Thank you for your time! :D We now resume our regularly scheduled program of gibberish, nonsense, and tomfoolery.)