Thork is right about this though. You can't call a single transgression harassment, that's not what harassment is, it implies a pattern of behavior.
It's not a single transgression, that's the crux of the issue.
We've had an entire thread harassing Tom, which specifically featured RonJ as one of the most prolific contributors. Tom asked people to stop. They didn't stop. The thread got locked, and everyone involved was told to cool it. Yeah, junker didn't slap everyone with an individual PM warning - I don't think he should need to. Nonetheless, I don't think anyone had any doubts about the situation.
Fast-forward a few months, a handful of people try to resume this behaviour. I point out that we'd agreed this would stop. Most people stop. RonJ
immediately chooses to double down. How many more times should we have to ask him before we can conclude that he was blatantly not interested in behaving?
And Rule 2 clearly stipulates that the offender should have been asked by the person being harassed to stop. So the fact that Tom has whined about how everyone makes fun of him in the past should be moot. Unless Tom specifically asked RonJ to stop I don't see how a ban is fair per the very verbiage of the rule in question.
The consensus we reached previously is that the rule can be applied to groups of people, and they were all asked to stop before. I didn't want to immediately start throwing bans around, which is why I repeated the request for people to stop, and only acted when RonJ openly chose to test me. The exact letter of the rule is important, but it is not the be-all-end-all - the spirit of the rule in this case is to prefer hate mobs like the original Tom thread from forming again. Ron was perfectly aware of the fact that Tom doesn't wish to be harassed in this form (he was informed of that before, and reminded moments before he chose to lash out) - that should be all that matters here.