Bro Dartagnan, and Thai delight, I respect you for sticking up for a newbie i.e. TheReviewer ("TR"). It shows good character and it reflects well on the forum.
TR did get hammered with neg 40 in one thread but I can recall several stuations where bigger hammers were used e.g. a cetain Lord getting neg 60 for a single "shes so bloody ugly" post.
As you say TR did get off to a bad start. That can be a hard position to recover from especially as TR did receive many warning shots across the bow but chose to ignore them (some came from the non-mod members too). Personnally I think it was not just due to "clumsy writing" or naivity, TR showed inconsistencies in his posts and appeared intent on provoking neg responses. At one point I recommended he give respect if he wanted to receive it, but deaf ears.
To clarify and give some transparency (as you requested), TR was subject of discussion amongst the mods. This is standard practice in the rare occasions when we encounter newbies we suspect may not have the Forum's best intentions at heart.
It means we get a pretty extensive coverage/view into newbie posters without being limited to our individual resources. We don't just look at one thread in isolation, once flagged we look at all of them, it's the only viable method. This is discussed in private as the aim is to give the benefit of the doubt and/or allow a member to get the hint (subtle or otherwise), to learn some protocol, and not be subject to some members jumping to conclusions and hammering the Bro thinking they have mods backing.
As you know we also have a senior Bros area to discuss such things but that is more of an alert system e.g. if something is very much amiss, like a fake report, we want to involve the senior members so they can have some insight before they may go around handing out K+ they may later regret (it's there forever), and to have some playtime.
We try to be consistent but as you know people have different personalities and varying levels of patience, and so do the mods (Kaka also referred to this). I think this is a good thing as it gives some balance. I hope we can move on.