OK, thanks. Just trying to keep up. 
I held my tongue until now.
Desmostylus…BANNED name!
Aw, somebody had to do it.
That’s sort of what I was getting at… there should be different classes of fouls, and to me, the above would be a minor one, not worthy of going on one’s “permanent record.”
It seems a bit lopsided to me that you’d count the occasional minor snark as a warning. That’s going to happen now and then. But at the same time, there’s no censure on people who habitually hang around the pit spoiling for a fight. That’s not right, either.
And Desmostylus did post in that thread, anyway. Check out posts 63, 66, 69, and 72. You had his name misspelled in your post; did you perhaps misspell it in the search, too? If it’s any comfort, I only just now realized that “s” was in there.
Oh, crap: I was searching on “demos”, not “desmos”.
Apologies.
Named after the Greek orator. Or is there a joke I’m missing?
Smiley or not, isn’t that tantamount to encouraging trolling? I don’t have an unduly thin skin, but I find it hard to believe that such a remark would pass unnoticed if it were made by a regular member and not an Admin.
What a I missing, here, Case? Gaudere said that she had considered modiying the user label for posters on final warning, but decided against such an action as it would be tantamount to encouraging other mean-spirited posters to snipe at the “branded” poster until that poster lashed out and broke a rule, getting them banned. For that reason she decided that modifying the user label was not an appropriate action.
Where is the trolling?
I think you misunderstand what was being said. Saying ‘A’ is what would happen if we did ‘B’, so we won’t do ‘B’, is not the anything like encouraging ‘A’. Unless you think that ‘A’ would never have occurred to anyone until it was mentioned. Do you honestly think it would never occurred to anyone?
My concern about the warnings that are reproduced after anyone is banned is that some of them always appear as slight taps on the wrist that you might expect would have be long forgotten & forgiven. Yet suddenly here they are back again on someone’s permanent record, contributing to a banning.
Does a long-standing poster have to worry about dumb things they may have done in their hot-headed youth? Have they been teetering on the brink of banning for the last 5 years, but never known it?
There’s also times when a mod may have got it wrong (yes, it does happen.) Times when you might feel you’ve unjustly been given a telling off, but have let the issue lie rather than cause a fuss. It would now seem that any time you feel you have been unfairly mentioned (even in passing) in a mod’s post you must immediately spring to your defence with vigour, lest it comes back to add weight to a banning years further down the line.
It seems to me that if the SDMB is going to administer some kind of strict enforcement of warnings and bannings where nothing is ever forgotten, it will need to devise a much clearer way of issuing the warnings and letting people know exactly where they stand.
Nah, I like to have a life in the big blue room 
:smack: That paragraph again, except this time in a way that makes sense…
I think you misunderstand what was being said. Saying “A is what would happen if we did B, so we won’t do B”, is not anything like encouraging A. Unless you think that A would never have occurred to anyone until it was mentioned. Do you honestly think it would never occur to anyone?
I’m not looking to start any “I’m a paying customer and I demand a better standard of service” squabbles here, and I’m not accusing Gaudere of trolling: I just think that such a remark, even in jest, is at least ill-considered for an Admin to make. As I said in my earlier post, do you suppose it would pass without at least a slap on the wrist with a wet bus ticket if I had made it?
Really.
I wonder how how many warnings are in my permanent record? I know it’s at least one, and hope it’s (much) fewer than five. But I’m really not sure. I’ve also received a few "not really a warning"s… do those go in the permanent record too? Do those ever add up to equal an official warning? Do old warnings ever drop off the record?
IMHO&FWIW (I know, zilch), I had a run-in or two with Desmo myself but for the most part I thought he was an intelligent and articulate poster, and this banning is pretty surprising to me.
Along with the others, I still don’t get what you have a problem with.
Guadere merely stated that the thought crossed his/her(sorry?) mind and labeling the poster with any type of warning would essentially create an atmosphere where other posters would/might place straws on the camels back until it broke.
I think you’re missing something.
Uh, no. As Colibri first pointed out here, and I heard direct from Desmostylus elsewhere, the name is that of an extinct beast. Which orator were you thinking of?
Demosthenes?
To “tic-tac”? Verb transitive? 
What you are missing is the information you would already have if you had read the entire thread before posting.
Of course it would have. I think I’m not the only one who’s quite puzzled here - I simply don’t see why you think this comment was inappropriate. There’s just absolutely nothing wrong with what Gaudere said, as far as I can tell.
I don’t know why, but that seems to be a rather common fallacy at Straight Dope.
A -> B
:: B
What the…?
I’ve encountered it in arguments against the Modal Ontological Proof. The premise
G -> G
is discarded because someone thinks it is equivalent to the premise
G.
Liberal, I’m sure your diagrams make a lot of sense to those schooled in logic. Could you translate all those symbols into English for the rest of us?