Not defending Levan for what he said but as an outsider looking in it is obvious that James has something personal against Levan, I don't know why or for what reason but even before all this started it was pretty obvious James didn't like Levan's presence here on SOFT.
Yes, Levan could post some random and strange replies, even start some very weird threads, but the majority of the time the threads that he did post were extremely helpful to the local music scene, something he does care about. I can remember one thread in particular which was a huge amount of resources and advice on promoting a band on the internet, a project Levan was working on and he was good enough to take his time and energy to put this up for all of us to share and take from. Time and time again in that thread it was asked that James place it as a sticky somewhere so people didn't have to keep trawling through the site in order to get the information but these requests were completely ignored by James, why?
Levan was banned by James, and the reason started up a whole thread about whether it was right or wrong and the way that this forum is run. Not negatively I might add.
So when Levan's band did manage to get exposure internationally, his band came on here again, not to gloat or to enhance their egos, but purely to say to other musicians in the scene that it is possible! Some shrugged with indifference and said ''10,000 copies? big deal'', but the main aim of that thread as far as I could see was to encourage others and share something positive with local musicians regarding what they had done. As soon as James found out it was Levan though, that was it, thread removed, account banned, we shall never speak of this again.
I am cursious James, not to attack you but really what was the reason the Astroninja thread was taken down? Surely if it was for the sole reason that Levan had been banned before do you not think that is a little short sighted? Could you not have simply sent them a warning (I was under the impression the account was Astroninja as a whole and not just Levan posting) that one of their members had been banned in the past and their conduct would be closely monitored?
I have no doubt that this has gone far too personal now to be reconciled, however the world is not full of flowers and happy people, stop trying to pretend it is.