I went back to the PersonOfInterest thread and Burt replied to the thread (http://forum.imfdb.org/showthread.php?t=1231&page=3) so either it is not POI or it was him making a completely new account to trick us into thinking he was someone else.

Regarding the POI/Burt connection: I and several of the other mods have discussed the possibility that Burt might be POI re-incarnated. I admit that I'm not sure what to think.

But I don't think it's as obvious as some people believe it is. I think y'all need to ask yourself if you genuinely believe Burt is POI, or if you're just looking for another excuse to get him banned permanently.

Which is perfectly fine, even though you make this decision a lot more difficult than I expected it would be. :D Seriously, it's good that you can articulately make the case that maybe a permanent ban isn't such a good idea.

The number of images that IMFDB members upload is hardly what determines their "value" to the site. There are lots of people on this site (including some very active members) who don't upload images, but contribute in other ways. In Burt's case, I would say that when he's not being too stubborn (as in the Type 69 debate he had with you), he's helped suggest ways to better organize the site, and has actually made those changes happen. I've become lazy about that shit myself nowadays, so I welcome those with the enthusiasm for organization that I lack.

Also, while I personally became an Admin due to my work screencapping movies and TV shows, I haven't done much of that lately. I think I've worked on about three pages in all of 2011 so far. There was a time when I used to do that many in a week.

Well, the evidence I have:

* The name's in the same format (three worlds, all with initial caps).

* PersonOfInterest's last activity is 26th August 2010. He made a new account and came back (and got banned again) just under a month later on September 28th. Burt's first edit is a month and four days later.

* He obsesses over the same pages POI did, specifically Goldeneye and the N64 The World Is Not Enough. He made a total of 325 edits; fifty-nine are to those two pages or their talk pages (sixty-one if you include creating two redirects). He also made edits to the PS2 Grand Theft Auto games, another of POI's tendencies.

* He has POI's quirk of often taking two tries to sign talk page edits, if he bothers to sign them at all (look for places where he edits a talk page twice in a row, including his first two edits)

* The user who posted the top comment was PersonOfInterest. How come "both" of them think this is the right way to say things on a talk page?

* Neither of them upload images. PersonOfInterest uploaded exactly 9 files in his whole time here, none of then screenshots; as of his banning, Burt has uploaded absolutely nothing to the site.

* Burt said of RPG "we don't use that term on this site." Guess who decided that?

* In the Type 69 thread, Burt described me as havin "a history of being difficult." An odd thing to say of someone who's been absent for a year (at the time I had a history of doing absolutely nothing followed by screencapping Black); I could only think of two people who still thought I was a troublemaker (POI and AdAstra2009) and I really don't think Burt is AdAstra.

What's the trick? He posts straight after POI was banned again, bragging that we'd never find his alts. I'd assume the intention was to say "you'll never find my alts, such as this one, hahaha." It's rather like him.

I wasn't trying to suggest that; simply saying that his contributions are very much outdone by his tendency to cause trouble. Looking through the logs, his arsing around removing "RPG" from articles and the arguing over it accounts for 77 of his edits; almost a quarter of his contributions in total. He suggested those rules for games purely so he had license to edit his two pet articles his way (he threw in that game writeups can't include "personal opinions," which is designed to let him remove whatever isn't his opinion, while "any other information not relevant to identifying the weapon" basically allows him to remove anything he wants to barring the gun's name; it's his own little page lobotomy kit) and I imagine his edits to the MP5 page were a last ditch attempt to grant himself some veneer of respectability.

Re: game article rules, I'll try and knock up something better for that since there are articles that go too far into the realm of FAQ (Metal Gear Solid 2 shouldn't be telling the reader exactly how to find each weapon, for example, and I still don't know what that "passwords" field some VG gun tables have is supposed to be for) but Burt's rules were only ever designed to make Burt king of his pet pages, not to make good or informative pages. I should probably also write a guide to screencapping games along with it (my console setup is rather bizarre, and I've never heard anyone around here mention Irfanview as a method of capping PC games without a native screenshot function).

^this man has won the internetz
you should be a lawyer

Yeah, wow. You've been building this case for awhile, haven't you? Color me impressed.

if that's not proof enough, i dont know what is. Wow.

If Burt is not POI, I don't think his actions warrant a permanent ban. If he is indeed POI, then certainly. But we have to be sure. And heck, I'm sure he'll figure a way back in anyway.