Goldrusher, I'm not avoiding your question so much as I am not sure as to how I should answer it just yet; I'll try later.
Is "Here comes [fill in here] defense force" a bannable meme now?
Just curious what got goomba banned...looking at his post history I don't see anything really offensive.
He was banned for that, yes. It was rather ironic that it happened to him so soon after posting in this particular topic, though.
This is more or less covered in
this FAQ:
Innapropriate Posts & Banned Memes
- Thread Whining / Respect to Others. It's not that "Haters gonna hate" is a banned meme, it's that it's often used to be flippant and dismissive to other posters. If someone is trying to explain what they think about something, either treat them with respect or don't reply at all. So when you post "u mad", "deal with it", "haters gonna hate", "the GAF hivemind", "the usual suspects", "but GAF said x and now they're saying y!!!", "entitled whiners" or anything else that suggests that you don't care what other people think, you may be banned if it is taking away from discussion. This is getting to be a pretty big problem, and it's probably the single largest category of bans these days. If you don't want to discuss something, you don't need to post.
This also includes things like "weekend gaf", "sounds like a GameFAQs threads", "tl;dr", "cool story, bro", "Neat" and associated image macros, "who gives a shit", etc. This list is not exhaustive, and using variants of these statements such as "bold please" and "f*ck the haters" is not a good way to avoid getting banned, as the problem is the general message/intent of your post, not the specific words you are using. If you think a particular thread is lowering a quality of the forum, PM a moderator about it.
A lot of the "unwritten rules" of GAF are really just logical extensions of principles outlined in the ToS or in the FAQs. "Defense force" posts are not explicitly written there, but I think you can see how a mod may ban for a post like that as it has the same ability to take away from discussion and is as disrespectful as anything else in there.