Woah.. I just logged on again and was rather shocked to see all this. I never meant for this it to go this way.
The thing is you have to look at it from both sides I guess. As annoyed as I was for being banned and not knowing why, I understand that it's usually a case of merely just asking why. I've run, and still run, many game servers online and I know it's not the easiest thing in the world to do, especially when it's not a fulltime thing, and more a hobby than anything else. I can empathize with the SGS admin team because I've been there. You get so many queries in a day from folks who flame you or only function on half a brain etc, and all this, first and foremost, takes a back seat to life/work/girlfriend/wife/kids/family/sleep. They're running a free game server, be it as a hobby or just out of the love of the game, and frankly, they ARE doing the rest of us a favour there. I for one am desperate to get this ban lifted purely because I can't play anywhere else due to international servers having horrible latency. Few people can see that though, and you get the kiddies and TK'ers and downright troublemakers and other no-brainers who go do something stupid, and *knowingly* so, end up getting themselves banned and then flood the admin mailbox with what basically just amounts to harassment. The admin team isn’t getting paid for this, so why should they put themselves in the firing line of some angry ten year old with a bad attitude? On one of my old servers I actually had some guy flaming me in admin mail and on the forums, telling me how he was going to sue me because he was banned for breaking some pretty serious server rules.
Now on the other side of things, the most frustrating thing in the world is not being able to find answers. I understand the turn-around time of two weeks, as mentioned above, but when you get that on top of not being able to post and request help in the forums, send PM’s to admins, or use the ban query system, it gets incredibly frustrating. I don’t know if it’s just a glitch in the system or not but I can’t do anything on the SGS website. When I click on any of the neat looking tools they have there (ban query, cd-hash viewer, etc) I get a login screen that I can’t get through no matter what I put in there. I can’t post at all either, haven’t been able to since I joined, which was about two weeks ago, if not more. That’s really the only reason I came here to ask if anyone could help me. It was a stab in the dark in the hopes that someone here might be an admin or know an admin and care enough lol. I sent two emails off the day I got banned. One querying the ban to the games master, and the other querying the inability to post to the forum master, and I’m still waiting for a response, then again it hasn’t been two weeks so I’m not going to harass anyone about that.
I’d stay stick to what you’re doing, as you’re doing it well. My only suggestion would be to get a few more admin people on the mail and forums side of things. Maybe try (and I know this isn’t easy) to stagger those admin guys so there’s at least one person watching mailboxes and new forum joins at any given time.
One thing I’m curious about however. Why do you have your forums set to not allow posting until an admin gives a new member posting rights? The only reason I can think of is the threat of spam crawlers and forum bots, but wouldn’t a little human verification on your sign-ups solve that? You guys have a huge line of people waiting to be given posting rights and to some degree I can understand how bad that looks from the users’ points of view.
Ultimately a lot of people don’t realize that something like this is very much a pet project and can fall down at any given time. Give the owners/admins/creators enough reason to start hating said project, and they’re gonna just drop it like an ugly blind date. Then where does that leave us? On the flip of the same coin however, the owners/admins also need to realize that they invited the outside world into their pet project. Don’t be bad party hosts and neglect your guests.
Anyway, just my thoughts on the matter, minus all the Irish sailor-language of course. *grins*
But in all honesty, nothing gets more deadly then a rape session at TV by the MEC chopper 
