It's very different. You shouldn't be able to
interact with the forums sure, but logging out, reading posts, reading rules, that isn't interacting with anyone. You're interacting with your own account.
Now I've never been banned on the forums, so I don't know what it looks like, but not even being able to read things is unecessary.
I see where you're coming from but it's still different, as there are no 'private lobby's' on either the server nor the forums. You can get banned for stuff other than just interacting with players ofcourse, but most bans are due to hacking and misbehaving, both of which affect other players. If there were private lobby's, I don't see what the problem would be allowing banned people to come visit, read the rules, and vote, as you're not interacting with anyone.
Ofcourse the story is different for stuff like DDOSsing, because that affects the entire server, but I'm sure you know what I mean.
I like comparing platforms to other platforms, so that's what I'm going to do. On Reddit, you can get banned from subreddits. You won't be able to interact with said subreddit, you can only see posts and upvote them. You're basically blocked from doing any harm, since all the harm you CAN do is posting comments, that's the case with most forums. But since you can't comment anymore, this 'ban/mute' is more than enough to deter people from misbehaving.
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This is much more thought out and makes much more sense, and it should be the case here aswell.
What does this have to do with the suggestion.