I actually admire him for acepting his mistake. Very few people do it.
You and the Mod who banned him say it was a mistake. So is that the Law? A judgmental Moderator who may or may not say your post or mine is considered spam is Dubbed a mistake? There is a fine thin line when you cast a judgement on a user posting and just because a Bear is in a bad mood doesn't give hime/her the right to ban a person unless it is a true Violation not a judgment call. He/she may own the site but let's be a little more consistent about the "Spam" accusations.
Just because you own a site or moderate does not give you a free ticket to mute,ban or delete posts based on your "opinion". You do this based on fact not the measurement of a sentence or how many words are in that sentence. You can post a single word and contribute to the topic without it being labeled spam. Simply agreeing with a post with a single word yes or no contributes to the the original post without being considered spam, But in some eyes if you post one word your are labeled a spammer.
The whole entire forum needs Re-Educaticing starting with the Mods.
Lets be consistent with the rules. one rule Aplies to all not just some. I have read through several Moderators postings and have found almost all have "one liners" So if one liners are considered spam who Bans/Mutes the Mods?
Let's be consistent Right?
This sounds good in theory, but fails in practice. Setting strict rules for what is spam and what isn't, with a hard line for consistency, with no room for judgement or opinions? Even if that were possible, it would just be abused by spammers doing the minimum +1. At this point, might as well just have bots doing the moderation. And then eventually someone would have to track down Will Smith in order to save us from the AI.
Don't get me wrong, I do have criteria and red flags I look at, but they're still subjective and open to interpretation.
Also, discretion and using human judgement isn't always a bad thing. For example, if I blindly followed the rules with no deviation like you suggest, you would be banned since you're ban evading (I won't). Moderation in all things, including moderation.