I certainly hope I don’t get in trouble for raising an old issue of some sort. I’m just curious.
Today on the General Discussion board, a zombie thread from 2003 reappeared, the topic was “Neutralizing salt and sugar”.
After the OP’s name I noticed he/she was banned. Curious to see what happened, I clicked on their profile and saw the last activity from this poster was a date in 2003. I opened the thread they started at that time, a convoluted query about religion.
It did not appear to be offensive, just poorly written. The OP made only that one post. People replied as best they could given the uncertainty of the OP. No one called for moderators. No moderator comments were posted. That was it, his/hers last post and they were banned.
There is no date listed for the ban so perhaps something happened later and it was removed?
If someone is banned for being a sock (a second account of someone else) there is no warning, no discussion, no announcement, just banning.
If you are a real single-use poster you will get a warning on an infraction, usually publicly, and there will also be a post in ATMB about why you were banned.
This was way before I was a mod, but I see in our archives* that they were warned twice. Apparently, they were starting large number of threads in the wrong forum, and didn’t stop after being instructed to do so. Shortly after (possibly as a response to the first warning) she spammed half the forums on the board with the same message, begging not to be banned.
I would imagine it’s pretty common to be banned for something that was not your final post here. The process can take some time, so a poster may post something ban-worthy, go on posting for some time, and then get banned.
Does this help? He was banned for repeatedly posting copyrighted material, despite being warned to stop. The fact that he was a weirdo and an anti-Semite probably didn’t help matters. I think this was back before there were official threads announcing the banning of long term posters.
[ The Brain ] So, {rubbing hands together} I’ll use Reverse Psychology Instead! If I start a post on all the forums Begging to be Banned … then I’ll Rule the Boards Forever! [ / The Brain ]
Looks like this summarizes it the best. Persisting after the warnings is just, well, asking for it. That does bring up a question, though. Isn’t reprinting parts of copyrighted material for discussion considered ‘fair use’?
Small excerpts are OK, along with summaries and links. It looks like he was posting entire articles, or significant chunks of articles. It’s hard to tell so long after the fact. Also, fair use is a legal concept, and the board can enforce stricter policies if the admins want. A couple of Cecil’s columns have been reprinted in their entirety without acknowledgement or permission, so the admins are very wary of violating anyone else’s copyright. They’ll usually just give you a mod note at first and only escalate to warnings and banning if you persist.
ETA: I’m not a mod here, so if I’ve got anything wrong hopefully an actual mod will correct me.