# Charter Member Desmostylus banned **URL:** \ **Category:** About This Message Board\ **Created:** [May 30, 2005, 2:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/charter-member-desmostylus-banned/306092 "2005-05-30T14:39:05Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![C\_K\_Dexter\_Haven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/b2d939/32.png) [@C\_K\_Dexter\_Haven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/C_K_Dexter_Haven)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2005, 1:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/charter-member-desmostylus-banned/306092/81 "2005-06-21T13:22:58Z")
I guess I’m confused, what is there about > [@](#): > > Consider this a dead-serious final warning, Desmostylus. You have several warnings before over quite a span of time about this type of aggressive behavior in various forums. Another incident and you’re out. … that might leave him unclear about where he stood? This has been said before but I’ll say it again. It’s not like we keep a score or a number of points in a secret record book; we’re not Santa Claus tracking naughty and surprising the bad child with a lump of coal. It’s also not like there’s a difference between a Formal Warning Filed In Triplicate and a casual “knock it off” type comment; neither are we government bureaucrats. We expel people based on a pattern of repeated misbehavior. We don’t try to measure that 6.25 “knock it off” comments equals one “official warning” and that 3 official warnings equals a “Hey, this is serious, dammit, pay attention when a Moderator talks to you.” Consider a person who had four or five “warnings” about different offenses (e.g., once posting in the wrong forum, once using personal insults in debate, once quoting an entire song lyric, etc.) – we’d probably think such a person was pretty dense, but if those were innocent goofs, we wouldn’t view those as a repeated behavior pattern. OTOH, a person with the same number of warnings about the same offense (like using personal insults in debate) would be a repeated behavior pattern, and would have a final warning. And the thing about repeated behaviors is that often they are behaviors that people don’t change. If someone has a history of throwing temper tantrums, for instance, it’s unlikely that a Moderator saying “Cool it!” will have any effect. Even “This is your final warning, one more temper tantrum and you’re out of here.” While a few people are able to heed such warnings, many are not, and so do not, in fact, become “more restrained.” ---
**Author:** ![Liberal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/848f3c/32.png) [@Liberal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Liberal)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2005, 1:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/charter-member-desmostylus-banned/306092/82 "2005-06-21T13:25:22Z")
> [@Dex](#): > > We don’t try to measure that 6.25 “knock it off” comments equals one “official warning” and that 3 official warnings equals a “Hey, this is serious, dammit, pay attention when a Moderator talks to you.” Yeah, but everybody knows that one aw-shit wipes away a hundred 'at-a-boys. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![flight](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/bbce88/32.png) [@flight](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/flight)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2005, 2:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/charter-member-desmostylus-banned/306092/83 "2005-06-21T14:52:55Z")
> [@roger thornhill](#): > > And shouldn’t that be ‘tow’-ing the line, as in ‘kowtow’? 😉 ;j 😃😛 Wasn’t there an article or staff report on that? Can’t seem to find it. ---
**Author:** ![Aholibah](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/e0b2c6/32.png) [@Aholibah](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Aholibah)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2005, 3:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/charter-member-desmostylus-banned/306092/84 "2005-06-21T15:09:59Z")
Don’t know about a staff report, but [The Word Detective](http://www.word-detective.com/103001.html#toetheline) answered this one definitively. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/charter-member-desmostylus-banned/306092.md?page=4)