> Si-"Unless you broke rules without knowing it...difficult, but possible"-gi

It's not as difficult as you'd think it ought to be. Based on the number of people who return again and again asking "why did u ban me?!?!", half the people we ban from Rinkchat get banned because they break the rules and are too socially incompetent to realise it. (I don't know about Owen's particular case so this doesn't necessarily apply to him.)

Somebody a few days ago was a great example of this. He came in a/s/ling everybody in sight and then proceeded to creep out at least one female chatter in private messages. After repeatedly being told to stop a particular line of conversation, he was kicked and later banned. His complaint? "But I didn't say any swear words!"

Following the rules set out in the chat policy does not mean you aren't still being offensive or disruptive in chat. If Sam tried to write a comprehensive set of rules which covered, in its entirety, how to behave in chat, it would take sixty pages. And he doesn't do it because people are assumed to know these things already; they are the ordinary conventions of social interaction. When we are faced with somebody in chat who doesn't appear to have any idea at all how to carry on a conversation with other human beings, there is little we can do except ban them, regardless of whether they're using any dirty words.