I don’t know what happened and didn’t see a deleted speculative thread, but things got unpleasant on here when it became obvious that Labour would form the next government. I came very close to leaving or taking a long break. This continued after the election and a lot of things were said that IMO clearly breached the guidelines (although I agree that these are far from hard and fast). Not just by one poster, but at times I was surprised at what was allowed to pass as acceptable.
As GN is not proactively moderated there has always been a somewhat patchy approach to deletions and bannings, so if GSM has indeed been banned (and that may not be the case) it could just be that several people reported her posts (I didn’t).
I got on well with GSM, although was shocked by some of her later posts and wondered whether she was ok. I did say so directly as I believe in being honest, but was told my opinion counted for nothing to her, so decided to just ignore her posts from then on. Had she stayed around and stopped being so rude that might have changed, as I don’t bear grudges, but for whatever reason she didn’t.
Maybe she’s just decided to step back from social media for a while, which I came close to doing myself. This is supposed to be fun, after all
. I hope GSM is ok, whatever happened, but will say that being in a position to give subject-specific advice does not give any of us a free pass to be rude the rest of the time.