Melchior wasn’t banned simply for holding a minority opinion and refusing to budge. Did you see his last contributions? This goes on for almost 20 pages and it never gets any better. It didn’t start in the pit, either. And as far as I’ve heard from anyone else who brought it up, this was his MO - this was all he did. He wasn’t banned for having an opinion and holding it.
I don’t know who mswas is/was, tbh.
So, why haven’t you been banned? Did you “knuckle under”?
Don’t fret. I’m sure there’ll be plenty of other new pledges for the “Gay Marriage is teh Suxx0rz” fraternity, and soon your cookie will be oogie once again.
Obviously not. But I have received several (not all) Warnings that were unjust, ticky-tack type fouls. And that’s the preamble to banning. make sure an unpopular poster wracks up enough infractions so the table is set, so to speak. This is what happened to Melchior. If you look at his individual Warnings one does not get the impression that that he(?) was unfit to post. But make sure he gets those infractions piled up and then out of nowhere for something really inconsequential, the Banning Hammer comes pounding down by someone like Marley. I also take breaks from the board due to work, which is no doubt a good thing.
There’s that and the fact that deep down, all know that I speak the truth. 
Butterflies: Take the above post with a grain of salt. You’re dealing with someone who’s counting everyone who doesn’t agree with his point of view that “Jews are vermin and should be exterminated” is a laugh-out-loud funny joke as left-leaning.
I fret not. I know it’s likely impossible for many on this board to grasp this, but there are some people who do not need the comfort of the crowd to be comfortable with their ideas. It’s also why there are so many poor posters here that get a pass, or even get pats on the back. This is a fact.
Completely incorrect. And any fair reading of what I’ve written will prove so. I have not said the joke was funny. Idid not think the joke was funny. At all. I’ve said more than once that it was a bad, failed attempt at humor, edgy variety. But that failing at humor should not be a Warnable offense. This, coupled with the general agreement that the perpetrator of the failed humor was not thought to actually hold antisemitic views, argues that he was not treated fairly in this instance.
So, Butterfiles, take in the above and judge for yourself which poster is putting forth facts and which is contorting and reassembling them into something that has no resemblance to the truth.
Isn’t it possible that you both are doing the latter?
mswas, as I said in another thread this week, underwent an epic meltdown (seemingly on purpose) which sealed his deal. Had 0% to do with his political beliefs.
I see your mswas and raise you december!
Remember him? Banned for being conservative back in the day.
There are three common patterns for banning. The first is spammers: A robot (or occasionally a person) creates an account just for the purpose of advertising something. They get squashed quickly by the moderators.
The second is sock puppets. Someone who was previously banned for some other reason creates a new account and comes back without permission. Sometimes these fly under the radar for a little while, but they generally get noticed pretty quickly, and re-banned.
The third is blatant trolling: Someone creates an account for the single purpose of stirring up as much trouble as possible, and never does anything else. These are usually banned within a day.
These three cases account for the vast majority of bannings. There’s also a fourth category, which is much rarer, but which is also much more noticeable: Occasionally, you’ll have a member who does contribute in a meaningful way, and who tries to be a part of the community, but who just steps over the line one time too many. A banning of this sort will be preceded by moderator warnings and usually a temporary suspension, because we’d really prefer to keep people as constructive members of the community. When such a person is banned, there will be a post in ATMB saying so, and explaining the reasons why.
I’ve heard tales, but he was before my time.
It stemmed from his/her participation in some SSM threads, in which he/she was playing devil’s advocate and making some of the more vocal liberal posters nuts.
Like Dio. No one would claim he was not a Lefty.
Viewing the board through rose-tinted welding goggles again, I see.
The way the mods usually put it is this: of all the posters who participate on this site, most never get a warning. Of the few who do get warnings, few get additional warnings. And even fewer get into enough trouble that they might end up getting banned.
Devil’s advocate, that’s what it was?
It’s true that am a political conservative and I have survived here since December 1999 without being banned. In fact, to the best of my recollection, I’ve received exactly one warning in all that time.
But I’ve managed to do this by reining in my conduct to a much greater degree than is required of an equally committed advocate for a position on the left. In my opinion, greater and more frequent transgressions are permitted when you advance a position favored by the left – as magellan01’s post hints.
At least twice in recent memory there’s been a concerted effort to “play the refs” – to engage moderation against something I was doing, and these efforts appeared to me to arise from baffled anger that the usual tactics of shouting down opposing views in concert weren’t all that effective.
The usual practice here is to announce, with tones of great confidence, predictions of victory for left-leaning positions, persons, or initiatives. I derail that at times by asking the predictors how confident they are, in terms that really matter: I offer up a bet. This is effective because there are few true consequences here for being wrong, as long as the cause you supported in your error was favored by the left. This discomfited several people, who started an ATMB thread trying to sway the moderators into banning this practice.
More recently, the refs were asked to step in because I was “derailing” a thread by insisting that it was a correct use of the word “persecution” to discuss Christianity’s treatment here on the SDMB – an unwelcoming environment. After baffled fury at the inability to re-write the Oxford English Dictionary, several posters here sought moderation intervention on the basis of, as far as I could discern, the lack of ability to stop my referring to the dictionary in support of my position.
If you’re interested in supporting political points of view that are not comfortably left-wing, you can certainly find a rewarding experience here. But it’s a bit like choosing to run with the bulls at Pamploma: fun, but one misstep and you’re unceremoniously trampled.
Banning itself is actually quite rare (aside from the obvious spammers.) It’s usually for repeated rules violations, and the most common violations are (a) personal insults directed at other posters, and (b) trolling (deliberate provocation.) The process almost always frequent warnings in advance of suspension and then banning (there are a few exceptions for egregious violations, like threatening a poster with death or lawsuit, say.) Contrary to what was said above, we do NOT ban someone for holding an unpopular opinion. We ban someone only when they’re a being a jerk about their opinions.
So, banning itself is rare, but DISCUSSION about banning does happen in ATMB fairly often. Sometimes the discussions is like this one, about what banning means. Sometimes the discussion is about someone who was banned (since often warnings are private, not publicly known.) Sometimes the discussion is about “why was this [public] warning issued?” and people (non-moderators) call for a banning. So, there are a variety of reasons for discussions about baning.
Melchior was clearly trolling, simply dismissing arguments against his position without actually addressing them and repeating the same non-arguments for his position for the purpose of keeping his threads going.
In every Warning issued to mswas, he had resorted to personal attacks on other posters, on several occasions after being told in a thread by a Mod to dial it back with no initial Warning issued.
December was caught trolling, even misattributing statements to make his point.
In contrast, posters such as Bricker and Sam Stone, (with far better conservative credentials), are not being Warned and are in no danger of banning.
On the other hand, the “liberal” credentials of Diogenes the Cynic, Collounsbury, or Satan hardly protected them from banning.