I think that I'm in a rather unusual, if not unique, position here.
Not only have I been a mod here for 13+ years & know what went down during that time, I'm also a member on a different forum and see similar things going down. What makes me different in this is that on that forum, I'm not just a member but I know the owner, the web master & some of the mods personally. So I'm in the position there of members here, except that I also know some of the management on a personal level.
Guess what? They can't & don't tell me squat either. I've never been a part of that sites management, but they developed many similar rules as we have, most notably that when they take some action regarding a member, it's also kept private.
I've been and still am personal friends with members there who have been suspended and banned. And sometimes it's been a member who was very popular with some groups of members & they raise holy [beeep], demanding to get them back, to know what happened, to know just why their friend was picked on, yadda yadda yadda. Sometimes it appears to me that they got a raw deal & it was some sort of personal vendetta against them, sometimes they were just being themselves & clearly deserved what they got, but I mostly don't know what happened. Sometimes I've seen the melt down before it got removed but usually not. The only thing that I have to counter that impression are my relations with people on the other side of that fence, they just really aren't the type of people by & large that I expect vindictive behavior from & despite members allegations, he really doesn't take the stuff personally.
But I really have no way to know. I, much as you here, know what one side does tell me & that's it. And that's never going to change. The only way it would change would be for me to become part of the admin, get access to the private forums & dig up old threads. And since that's never going to happen, it means I'll never know for sure what happened with any of them.
You folks are in that position here. You don't see everything. You likely don't even see everything that happens out in the open forums and certainly don't see what happens when it gets back to the mods to deal with it. Your friends will tell you something & that's pretty much all you're going to get.
It's not that we don't care about the members here but we do have practices & policies in place here. They exist for reasons & we've explained these many times. We simply can't give you what you want so you manage to work yourself up over what really amounts to gossip that we can't rebut.
There isn't anyone here who can simply ban someone without being accountable to the rest of us. I can set a user to be banned, as a site administrator I necessarily have that access, but if I don't have a justifiable reason for doing that & bring it back to the mods immediately for discussion the next discussion & vote will be to send me packing for abusing my power.