I was just randomly banned from the server while in the middle of a normal game. The PlagueFest ZM server is otherwise very good but to maintain quality the admins should be a little responsible and pay attention to what they're doing if they are going to ban people for a first offense(which was not even an offense in this case). It was just a few minutes ago, about 1:25PM Eastern, April 1 '07. Right before I was kicked and banned, people were complaining about spawn camping and the admin posted messages threatening temporary bans on the first offense. I don't know who the admin was, because I got banned when I stopped to bring up the chat console to read the damn messages! I had a pretty high score(as did others) because of a big stand early in the game, so maybe it was just laziness in not actually observing people before banning them from the server. (as in "oh, look some guy has a bunch of points and is near a spawn location, I'll just ban him") Standing still for 10 seconds, not shooting anything mind you, is hardly a reason to ban somebody.
This is exactly why you must pay attention to who is admin. But most likely this ban is only temp, so no need to worry, its probally like a 2 hour ban anyways. To prevent this situation from happening again, do NOT go near spawn, and stay there for more than 5 seconds.
I think it was only 10 minutes. I joined back in a half hour later and it looks like it was Lazyvulture. (I see somebody else just posted about the same game, heh) I asked him about the ban and he said it was for spawn camping. He apologized after I said I wasn't doing so. He was nice about it but it looks like I was right about being banned for standing still for a few seconds. If you're going to ban people, you really need to put at least a little observation into it. Your guideline of not standing near a spawn for 5 seconds is not something you can realistically expect. This was on the towers map, in which you have a large open ground-level area where people spawn. You can spawn camp from half the areas in the map. And I'll mention again that the admin never saw me shoot anybody. I literally stood still in a field for a few seconds to check what the admin was saying in the chat. For what it's worth, he was also trying to kick the afk players who attract this sort of thing.
This is where and when I got banned. I'm all for not being able to spawn camp, but not every spawn death is a camp kill. f you're there for a minute, and a zombie runs by, you can't expect them to look at the player's name before killing them.
Sorry. I was in spec and was watching. I watched you AFK for at least a couple of mins, so I banned you for 10 mins (some people pretend to be AFK and then spawnkill). As I said at the time. No warnings. And that is why I only ever ban for like 10 mins.