I was lured in by their marketing people who are also members of the Absolute Write forums. One of them was Victoria Strauss who is a formerly published author, now a self-published author. At first, I received what I believed was fairly good advice from a couple of anonymous people in the short fiction forum, but in the novel forum I was uncertain of the quality of advice there. I'd been warned by other people about Absolute Write and I'd read the many critiques online. The novel writing advice turned out to be lousy. I copied five things people were saying there and was able to show all of them to be erroneous. There were no mods around or professionals hanging out to help, like Strauss has claimed. It was just a free for all.
This site is not what it used to be. Mods are nasty, while at the same time ultra-sensitive themselves. "Advice" is divided into 70% meaningless fluff, 20% somewhat useful and 10% trolling. Not worth the aggro, for the most part.
MacAllister 'The Tyrant' Stone is rude, stubborn, and has a history of complaints about nonpayments to people she worked with. She also encourages horrible groupthink on her site, and is about as good at being an admin as the legendary 'Computer Fogie' of Sherdog infamy.
So, Lipeck, did you get banned for spamming, flaming, or trolling?
More than 10% trolling
You can get banned from this site now just for disagreeing with a mod, on just about anything, regardless of how you express it. And sometimes for irrationally silly reasons, like the use of an innocuous word the Admin doesn't like, for some reason. And God forbid you should point out some inanity expressed by one of the mods themselves. The site has become incredibly cliquish, and is largely a playground for allegedly aspiring heroic fantasy writers who think Tolkien invented the genre, and probably know of Tolkien only through Peter Jackson's movies. Once a good place, not any more.