It was informal in that he'd tell us briefly that there was a situation, and to "be on the lookout for shitheads." We'd either already know the general story because back then, people in chat would volunteer information (people whispered me all the time and kept me filled in), or we'd know from detractor content (Madara watches Soma Julius Cruz, for instance). Anyone who didn't already know found other from other mods, not Phil himself. He trusts his mods to feel out naturally what he would or wouldn't want banned from there. If you poked and prodded him on any specific issue, he'd more often get angry at the mod.
In some cases, he'd outright lie to us to explain why we had to ban certain things, and then he pretended he was giving us insider secret knowledge of the situation. It was bogus as fuck.
He claimed that the reason Subaruman's name was being added to the chat filters was because it was the name of a big time donor who got dox'd and he wanted to protect them. He told us to be very firm with banning people talking about his wife because she had recently left an abusive relationship and she needed to heal. When we let Swagginz back, and this is the only time he fed us a lie that we all knew was a lie, we were told to lie if he asked about why we were completely wiping the server before he could be let back in. I can't even remember the stupid lie we were supposed to repeat, just that the truth was Phil didn't fully trust Swagginz, so he wiped most of the server.