Now... regarding sonatine...

Ultimately, it is up to him what he wants to do. His account on PFA is now and has always been in good standing. If he wants to leave, so be it.

I am a bit perplexed regarding his feelings regarding this site.

sonatine has never been shy about trolling or aggravating those he didn't like here. Often the trolling was justified or semi-justified, but nonetheless he really let those people have it.

Take Mumbles, for example. Yes, he makes some stupid or trying-too-hard postings here, but it came to the point where sonatine was pretty much going after anything Mumbles posted -- even if Mumbles started a reasonable thread (one which would have been taken seriously had anyone else started it).

I tried to give sonatine space to be himself and stayed mostly hands-off with what he was doing. Much of the userbase liked him, and he contributed a lot of good content here, so I didn't want to micromanage him. I felt he had earned the right to step over the line every so often, as long as it wasn't too extreme.

But at the same time, he did contribute a lot to the contentious environment here. When you keep posting garrett's suicide smock pic, is it likely that garrett will make more or fewer shitposts in response?

Basically sonatine loved to stir the pot, but now he's apparently leaving because the pot got over-stirred, bubbled over, and he doesn't like the resulting mess. Again, it's his right to leave at any point, but I see that he had his hand in some of the unrest, even if not intentionally.

My relationship with sonatine has always been complicated.

We got along okay for awhile on NWP/DD, but eventually he became close with the Skatz guys, and he contributed his fair share of nasty treatment of me at DD towards the end. He knew this, because when I put up PFA, he wasn't sure if I was even going to allow him to have an account here.

When he did register, I had no intention of banning him, but I was a little uneasy, wondering if this was just going to be an extension of his DD trolling of me. Instead, he treated me and this site respectfully, so my opinion of him went up again.

When I got access to the Skatz admin forum and saw the shit talk about me there, I wasn't thrilled with some of the stuff sonatine said. However, his shit talk was relatively mild, and if anything, seemed to be manufactured just to assure these guys that he was still one of them. And he WAS still one of them, but he also seemed to honestly enjoy this site, and spent a lot of time here.

I did appreciate one exchange there, when one of the Skatz trolls made a remark about how horrible I must be in person, and sonatine responded by saying that I was completely normal and polite when we met. Someone thought he was kidding, but he reiterated that he was serious. sonatine never expected me to see that post, so I appreciated him piping up in my defense there. That didn't go unnoticed.

Overall, I will be sad to see sonatine go if he chooses to leave, and PFA will be worse overall without him. At the same time, you can't splash mud everywhere and then complain about the mess, so I hope he realizes that it needs to be a collaborative effort here if we are going to cut down on the shitposts and return to the days of quality threads.