Up-and-coming e-sports site onGamers is staring down the barrel of a 50 percent drop in its traffic after being banned for a minimum of a year due to the actions of one of its editors. Senior editor (and onGamers' first employee) Rod "Slasher" Breslau had been privately messaging various redditors, asking them to submit certain posts to various subreddits. A month later, reddit admins responded by banning all onGamers content for at least a year.

This was not the first time onGamers has fallen foul of reddit's rules. The site was banned in April due to the high number of self-submissions, where onGamers writers submitted their own content to reddit. Self-submissions are permitted on Reddit, but risk being labeled as spam if they are not offset by an even greater number of other contributions; the April ban occurred because the various onGamers writers were submitting their own content almost exclusively.

That ban was lifted after onGamers staff, including Breslau, made personal appeals to reddit's admins and promised to behave better. It appeared that they were doing so, with third parties submitting links to the onGamers site.

However, it was then revealed that Breslau had been petitioning popular redditors to submit onGamers content on his behalf. In early June, Breslau approached guardcrushspecial, a prolific poster in the implausibly named /r/Kappa (a subreddit that has somehow become an important part of the fighting game community), to ask him to post a link to an onGamers story.

guardcrushspecial, having something of a trollish reputation (even calling himself "literally wors[e] than Hitler"), did so by submitting a link to a screenshot of Breslau's message.

A month later, Breslau's reddit account was banned, as were any and all submissions of onGamers content. Breslau was subsequently fired from onGamers, writing an apology in which he takes full responsibility for this attempt to game reddit.

The first ban, in April, had many in the reddit community divided. Although they appreciate that continued self-submissions may constitute spam, at least some subreddits, such as /r/Dota2, felt that the OnGamers content was likely to be posted anyway, and so having it self-submitted by story authors was essentially harmless; it simply saved someone else from having to do the work.

The rules are known, however, and onGamers was not the first site to be penalized in this way; in 2012, sites, including The Atlantic, were temporarily banned due to a high number of self-submissions.

The reaction to the second banning, and Breslau's attempts to get others to submit on his behalf, was more consistent, with many redditors incredulous that someone who'd only just avoided a long-term ban would continue to subvert the rules in this way.

The ban looks likely to have severe repercussions for onGamers. Kim Rom, CBS Interactive's vice president of e-sports, told Daily Dot that about half of onGamers' traffic came from reddit, and that losing so much traffic has "seriously endangered the livelihood" of onGamers' staff. onGamers and CBSi are now struggling to figure out what to do next. The site's presence on Facebook and Twitter is small, and the gap left by reddit will be hard to fill.