I don't really care anymore whether I was silenced or not. But I can't agree with your reasons why the feature should even exist. What are the advantages of /borg over /ignore? As far as I can see, it's only that the god gets to a) save some effort on the part of other monks, and b) force their opnion on other monks. For users other than the borged monk, both commands have the same effect -- stopping that monk's comments appearing on the chatterbox. For the monk h(im|er)self though, it's a not even something they can question. They can't apologise, they can't protest, they can't ask whether anyone else disagrees: their opinion has been been cancelled and sent back for a refund. Like I said in my post, isn't the whole point of somewhere like Perl Monks the exchange of information and opinion?

Maybe it would be OK to make the monk's comments not appear to guests viewing the site, who don't have an option to ignore people. And I can think of situations where someone losing the ability to use the chatterbox would actually be warranted (perhaps the situation I was talking about before was one of them?). Shutting someone up without explanation or the opportunity to appeal, however, is not so cool.

But hey, you know, if I had a site I'd probably do it all the time.