Oh I know VK was no angel I was there when the blue touchpaper was lit and I was there when the fireworks finally burned out He was argumentative arrogant prone to flare ups and wouldn t let go on an issue once he had his ire up However he was also subject to a relentless campaign of harassment for years by people who should know better and there was a small group of the same few admins who had a dislike for him and would watch his contributions for a pretext to block him He had much the same role in 2007 as Giano had in 2008 or Malleus in 2009 However again like Malleus and Giano as you say when he wasn t involved in his scorpions in a bottle routine with KB and RP which was most of the time he was helpful productive hardworking and willing to get stuck into the boring minutiae which far too many of the Grand Actors of Wikipedia think is beneath them There s a qualitative difference between a dog which is repeatedly poked with a stick and eventually bites its pokers and a rabid dog who attacks people at random even if the net result of both is people get bitten and the dog gets shot In any case length of block log is generally an awful measure of problematicness A truly problematic user generally only has one entry in their block log scent