...I no longer even recall the name of the moderator (Jim something?) who banned him....
That would be Jim Hoft, of gatewaypundit. The powerline boys had little interest in moderating their forum, and for a while before closing up shop, they ceded the responsibility to Jim Hoft.
When you look at forums that are out there, and think about what they had there, they were utter fools from the very beginning. From what I saw, they had the top forum on the Internet, and certainly far and away the best conservative forum. They regularly had posts that would top 20-30K responses within a few days. You could make a post and in 30 minutes, it would be 5-10 pages long, with people chiming in in real time, having actual ongoing conversations.
A forum like that needed minimum of one moderator for each of the highly trafficked categories, 24/7/365. Which probably meant about a dozen or more mods, making sure that a few were available during the overnight hours.
It also needed some presence by the site proprietors. People came there in the first place because of the fame garnered by their involvement in the "RatherGate" scandal. Hinderaker popped his head in every so often, but they basically created the forum and turned it over to the wolves.
With the traffic they had, they could've turned that into a mega-conservative forum that today, does not even exist, and it could've been extremely profitable. Their lives, their finances, and conservatism on the Internet could all be enhanced today if they had taken responsibility for stewardship over the great gift that fell into their laps. Instead, they neglected it.
On a side note... anyone remember my thread there, "A Prayer for April"? I was a new Christian at the time, zealous to demonstrate my faith, and expressed it in a genuinely-worded prayer for the dumbest box o' rox on the forum. I was just f***ing blasted from all sides as people argued whether I was being genuine or passive-aggressive, and the thread went on to become one of the longest ever on the site.
This was MY "April" Trap...
Then there was "Seaberry"...
And I can't remember who this was...