He often made valuable contributions, especially as he is a former seaman with a vast knowledge of maritime subjects.
However, he couldn't grasp the legalities of cut'n'paste postings. We can't just nick pages of text off newspaper sites to re-post on'ere as if it's our own work. We'll get sued. Everyone else complied with the Board's conventions on this but he wouldn't and it caused arguments.
Dunno if that's what caused him to leave in the end but I'm sure it contributed.
He left because of my actions.
First, over the course of a number of months, I moved a lot of his threads into Mainstream News and Chat from other subfora. Rynner, ultimately, believes that everything is Fortean; in a sense he's right, but in my view that would make this a message board about anything and everything, not just traditional Forteana. No focus = no reason for us to be here rather than somewhere else.
Second, I removed a number of 'filler' articles that didn't supply any more information. Again, in one sense he had a point, clippings and reports are often very valuable for squeezing out details, but the proliferation of incestuous news sources we have online today--all ultimately rewriting identical press releases--often means, perversely, that more is less. I pulled a number of them and he took it personally.
I don't with the benefit of hindsight think that I would act differently were the situation to recur today, but I might try to get somebody else to share the dirty work of implementing group decisions as I still feel badly about it. Unfortunately, at that point--almost two years ago--I was pretty much the only moderator regularly online, so there was nobody else to get stuff done.
I hope this doesn't sound too self-justificatory.
I'm a pretty decent cyberstalker (if you take my meaning) and I'm pretty confident when I say that Rynner is no longer online anywhere. I suspect his computer finally gave up the ghost and he decided to abandon the Internet.
I worry only as he repeatedly mentioned deteriorating health while he was here.