Thank you for the update, BartK! As unsatisfying as the reason is, for me personally it's good to at least have a reason, a lot of times in life we don't even get that.
For more context, whenever a policy/rules question came up in PW, we made it habit to have a discussion/consensus in the Mod-only subforum. So I recall posting in that subforum the question of whether we should allow, or moderate against discussions of other forums, not just PianoTell, but PianoClack, Keyboard Corner, /r/piano and others. My desire was to operate transparently for the mods and the admins. BartK said he wouldn't be moderating against 3rd party site mentions, and I agreed.
I also believe at the time I was banned from PW, I had created an account on PianoTell--mainly to avoid having the username sniped--but had never actually posted before (maybe Navindra has better records on this). So I'll echo Bart's note that it seems strange that VS thought I was trying to poach users.
I'm not sure if there was a single post they were offended by, or if it was a course of dealing over time, but I've tried to be very inclusive generally of other forums as a shared community, because that's what I personally feel is right:
https://forums.pianoworld.com/ubbthreads.php/topics/3504153/re-google-ads.html#Post3504153
https://forums.pianoworld.com/ubbthreads.php/topics/3519881/re-piano-tell-a-reaction-to-the-ad-situation.html#Post3519881
Again, water under the bridge as far as I'm concerned, I don't want to dredge up past conflicts. What's important here and now is that it seems PianoTell is doing very well, and is fast developing a critical mass of fine folks who are interested in piano, interested in a positive, supportive environment, and interested in having well-reasoned and helpful community moderation by valued members! 👏👏