First off, Marty will never accept restrictions. He already proved that with the posting limit. He wants to be where the action is, and wants to post as much as he feels like.
When Marty first showed up here, he was a good poster. This lasted only a few days, but his posts were initially so toned-down that it took a little while to figure out that he was even here (since he was posting under a new name).
However, predictably, Marty freaked out and went back to his old ways.
This occurred for several reasons:
1) He always has to be the center of attention, and will keep posting more and more until he is.
2) He developed a weird obsession with being seen as the vBulletin expert that has ridden in on his white horse to save me from my technical bumbling. He wrote countless messages -- both public and private -- chiding me for not knowing what I'm doing, and telling me to accept his "help". If I didn't respond, I got another message telling me that he was expecting a response to the previous one. It got to the point that I couldn't even announce a new upgrade or feature without him taking over the thread and claiming he could have done the same thing in 2 minutes.
3) He has trolls that will start up with him whenever he posts something objectionable, and he always comes back at them with a long essay full of fire. This turns the board into a big troll-fest -- something I didn't want.
4) He was a troll himself. He would show up in threads where there was no form of arguing and pick fights with people -- both his regular enemies as well as random people such as 408Mike that weren't even doing anything to him.
The basic problem is that you can't just unban Marty and take the good things he has to offer, while somehow squeezing out the bad. It's impossible. When you have Marty on your forum, you get all of him -- the good content and the entertaining diatribes, but also the annoying domination of the forum, manic behavior, ruining of threads, and bipolar/narcissistic tendencies.
This forum doesn't have a huge userbase (I hope it will improve over time, and I am going to keep promoting this place wherever I can), so it will have periods that aren't as active, especially when I'm not as actively posting. Also, new forums usually suffer from this after the initial "pop" of people joining and making their first few posts. DD was a complete ghost town after its first few weeks, but it recovered -- at least until last summer when all of the upheaval occurred.