I don't know about everyone, but deeneendo posts tend to be a little toxic. I think in general GAW allowed people to back out of the buyback, but they messed up the codes and some people got back a lot more primes than they had paid for. Some of these people took advantage of that and sold these ill gotten primes cheaply on the market and withdrew the BTC from ZenMiner. This whole thing has created a real mess and I'm sure pushed some people over that edge.
I don't think these will be lasting bans, but everyone probably needs to cool down a little.
Emotions run high at HT at the best of times, but this mess is 100% on GAW IMHO. They messed up the codes, mishandled the communication (exploit?), punished - even if temporarily - the unsuspecting marketplace buyers, got into legal threats for no good reason, even admitted to charging credit cards without proper authorization. There were so many opportunities to control the narrative of this story and for some inexplicable reason they failed to do that. Like for example this rumor on HT that a reseller told a buyer to keep the "gift". If that really happened GAW could throw the reseller under the bus, no one would shed a tear about it. If it didn't happen, bring forward the real story. Why not?
And then there is this:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=537912.msg9229612#msg9229612This customer was inaccurately charged for the product they received. So, they were then charged the difference with the credit card they have on file. We have logs that show the product you received we not the product you purchased.
So you can either:
A. Pay for the product you received
B. Your welcome return the BTC you took out by selling the product, and we will happily refund you.
Think about that for a moment. The customer was ACCURATELY charged for what he/she purchased. Was given a product that was more valuable. Decided to cash out. GAW charged the credit card on file. I mean the customer might be wrong to do that without contacting GAW first (depending on whether the "gift" rumor was real or not), but two wrongs can't make it right.
Let's say I purchase a cheap Cromebook on Amazon and some overworked minimum wage warehouse employee ships me a MacBook. Would Amazon (a) charge my credit card for the MacBook and fire the employee, (b) send me a threatening e-mail asking to pay up in 8 hours and fire the employee, or (c) ask me politely to return the MacBook, possibly throw in a generous gift card, and fire the employee.
I can understand the distress, with 200+ hashlets at 20+ "free" MH/s each, the potential loss to GAW was in six figures. But how does swinging the ban hammer around forums help with that?