When Elwood stepped down, I started a "Free Wordforge's Prisoners of Conscience" thread, arguing that Hood should be unbanned. There was a lot of support for the idea and Lanzman said he wasn't opposed to it. Muad Dib or someone pointed out that if he wanted to come back he needed to get in touch with Lanzman. Hood got in touch with me over here and I suggested he PM Lanzman's TK account. The WF thread just dropped off for lack of posts.
Then the last time WF was down I came over here and had a PM saying Lanzman had turned him down on coming back so I started the Help Desk thread to try and find out what was going on. Meanwhile Bock started a poll in the Red Room that was something like 37 to 2 in favor of Hood coming back. Eventually Lanzman came on to make a one line post that Hood's permaban would never be lifted.
So to recap: Wordforge has had 4 owners--Cass, Borgs, Elwood, and Lanzman.
-During Cass' reign, to my knowledge she permabanned exactly one poster: Joker.
-I'm not aware of any permabans during Borgs' reign, although he regularly threatened to ban Baba.
-At this point Nick used a stolen database backup to help Elwood strongarm Borgs into giving up the board. Elwood's first act was to lift the permaban on Joker. Then, during Elwood's reign he permabanned: Borgs, Hood, Ted, polarslam, goldeneye, CheekyMonkey, PhilR, and Starscream. On his last day he permabanned some guy apostle brought over for allegedly being a CheekyMonkey dual.
-During Lanzman's brief reign he got rid of the porn forum and will disappear for days before making even the simplest decision. (After about a week he finally unbanned apostle's friend.)
It starts to look to me like Elwood has himself a sweet deal. He's got himself a little puppet who pays for the board, deals with the headaches of running it, and takes the heat for any decisions, while Elwood stays in power behind the scenes. Of course that is just my read on the situation. :shrug: