Valdan is a known con; he's cheated people out of items on several occasions and it's been verified by bunches of people. Unfortunately GMs will not act on him because he steals items from the treasure pool before they end up in anyone else's inventory, and GM policy is that they cannot consider an item "stolen" from anyone unless it was actually in that person's inventory at some point.
The "public" should be informed of people like him, because GMs will not take action, and he's only able to keep getting away with things like that because of playerbase ignorance.
That other thread shifted focus to another sort of people, those who I'm guessing have unlikeable personalities or are just douchebags in general or done a few douchebaggy things. Not really the same class of people as outright thieves so it's more of a gray area and open to interpretation/debate. I think that thread deserved to have been locked or lockwarned because of the path it took, but I also think that people have a right to know about the truly unscrupulous folks. Not the ones that just talk sh*t and annoy you, but the ones that actually *do* really sh*tty things like steal/con.
People can go back and forth about Holman/Miracles/whatever, but I don't think *anyone* here but Josm will ever defend Valdan. And even Josm has pretty much said "well yeah, what he did was wrong, but it's still your fault for not safeguarding your items!" so he's generally considered a troll anyways.
(Just to point out, once that thread reached the point where it got all argumentative and flamey, I don't think anyone was even talking about Valdan anymore. Everyone in that thread knows he's a douche. Thread only got bad because other people entered the picture and it got off-topic.)
Edited, Sep 11th 2009 7:29am by Fynlar