Yesterday, after this debacle, I added a rule about Comment Abuse for the sake of clarity.

The Voat User Agreement requires us all to Respect Other Users, both their privacy and their freedom of speech. People who work hard on their research submissions shouldn't have their work overshadowed, their free speech suppressed, and the discussion of their submission derailed by off-topic rants, flame wars or copypasta spam in the Comment section. It's not right.

This has actually been in place for several months under Voat's Sitewide Rules. If you check the banlog, you will see that Putt added the Voat User Agreement to the rule violations list moderators can cite some time ago, and Donkey and his many alts were banned for comment abuse under that -- at the request of multiple users -- after he impersonated another user to discredit her research. TrustTheTruth was also banned for comment abuse under the Voat UA spam clause because he spammed the same longwinded, evidence-free rants over and over again, regardless of the submission topic.

It's now spelled out in our sidebar. Thoughts?

Edit: Link to banlog fixed.