I guess I’m confused, what is there about
… 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.”
