The admin team is in a predicament:
We'd love to make all the details public, so that we can wash away any doubts and not have to face the criticism we are facing in this thread. Believe me, given how limited the time I have for NS is, I really don't want to spend it dealing with this kind of pushback. I am sure all the other admins feel the same, given that we are all busy individuals.
However, there are RL-related implications and risks involved. As convenient as it would be for admins to release details about administrative bans, it would also be incredibly reckless and dangerous, both for the banned members themselves and for other members of our community. In most cases, it would also
additionally lead to serious violations of those members' privacy, with all the additional risks involved.
Almost always, the second factor far outweighs the first, and we are left to announce bans the way we do. It is not ideal, but the alternative is way worse.
I would also like to say that the two bans that happened in the past few months, Anumia's and Morwenna's, are not representative of any kind of policy change compared to how the admin team has always been operating. You can look at
this list and you will find many members that have received administrative bans over the years.
The circumstances for some of them are better known than for others. For example, Gerzam's ban is related to publicly porn spamming, and Henry's ban is related to publicly displayed erratic behavior.
For some others, the general gist of the circumstances is publicly known, but details are kept private. This would include members like Anumia, unibot, and Tyler.
And finally, there are others for whom what can be disclosed to the public is, by necessity, very little. Morwenna is in this category. Another such case would be blairclair - only the admins and forum members directly affected know the reasons for the ban.
One of the reasons why the admin team is kept so small and stable, and why it takes a long established record to be made an admin, is exactly to partially alleviate the issues arising from the fact that it is not possible to do administrative bans both perfectly transparently and perfectly safely.
My biased view is that the admin team has generally handled such bans appropriately, discreetly, and as transparently as possible. I say this speaking from experience in multiple other forums, where administrative bans are issued for much pettier (i.e., politically motivated) reasons without any explanation.
If other members don't feel the same, then there's not much to change in terms of policy to address their concerns. All that can be changed is the admin team itself: replace (some parts of) it with members that the community trusts more with handling the above trade-off between transparency and risk minimization. If that's the case, then people should go ahead and say so, instead of asking for a policy change in terms of what is disclosed.