I get that we missed the mark on Caiops and I'm not disagreeing with your point at all. I'm trying to explain why there was a failure of the system to understand that Caiops was a troll. Personally, and this is because I'm a stupid person not speaking for a single other mod on the site, I find trying to discern trolls in Sales threads fairly difficult because you also are able to use real sales data to obfuscate your troll. And yeah, I get the response to that is "if you can't figure it out why do you have this job", I told you, I'm stupid. But I think sometimes the obviousness within the community does not come across to those of us who are dealing with multiple different reports in multiple different communities with nuances that we are trying to learn about given that it's probably impossible for our mod staff to have members who take part in literally every single community on this board. That's why the ticket with the screenshots from the Brazilian message board was a little personally frustrating to me -- so, it was known that this user was posting on a Brazilian message board talking about how they don't care about Japanese sales? Yes, that gives us the necessary context now in this thread to make a decision. But if you all know about and we don't, then we can't use that information. We can look at post history, but at some point, we are going to need more help than just a report that says "trolling."
Again, I can't talk for the mod team, I'm more just talking for myself about experiencing the report system from the other side after being on ***/ERA for a while.
I don't know if you'll find this post useful or just frustrating, I'm just trying to explain a little more of our side's context.
I don't mean to call you or anyone on the mod team stupid. But if you have a question, why not reach out to us for information on why someone might have been reported and treated with ire?
I understand moderating is hard, I am not trying to say "well its easy, we can all see it clear as day", you're not as invested and some information can be clearly hard to discern but a regular can point you in the right direction and then you can watch for repeated "subtle trolling". I think the biggest problem I have with this is that you guys missed how someone long reported being the same one setting things off should have thrown up some red flags.
And no I don't find it frustrating, I've had to deal with the difficulties of moderations and community turmoil.
That said, I still have no idea how you arrived at those guidelines. I could be convinced to think Caiops wrote them.