SgtHydra got... a lot of warnings. More than average. And was in fact one of the first EpicFailers who used it so much we had to respond to it.
As far as the Gelem thing, we suspended/banned him as soon as he showed up and spent a lot of time deleting his threads, under his various IDs. Unfortunately if someone switches IP addresses, there's not much we can do to preemptively stop them. Sorry if folks got mad at us about that, but if you think it was irritating to read, imagine having to delete it all! And of course, then people would actually quote his spoilers. Arrgh.
(Also one of us mods is almost always around 24/7. Don't know if two Forum Assistants could cover it that well.)
We're not perfect: we wish we could send actual PMs through the moderation system so we could give you more detail than just 80 characters or whatever in "Other." But the system is set up so one error on your part or ours won't get you banned.
And sometimes we figure that you guys have read the TOS. (You can read the long boring detailed version here.) So we could be more detailed than just saying "Flaming" or "Disruptive." We'll keep an eye out for that.
At the end of the day, I could give some big spiel about how folks signed up for the TOS and agreed to abide by it (who reads all that tiny print, anyway?
But really, the TOS is just a big complicated legal way of saying "Be nice to people, stay on topic, if you post something have it add to the discussion, don't do anything illegal." Hang out, relax, talk and game about Avatar, use the off-topic lounge and your blogs for other stuff, and you're golden.
We all respect what you folks are doing here and wish you well.