Lately, I have noticed a number of users who have been around for a while are now banned. Usually, I’m reading an interesting thread, and i notice the BANNED status under a poster’s name that i recognize. I obviously don’t know when they were banned and why, but sometimes I am curious. I know some of the banned announcements are posted in ATMB, but not all of them, correct?
Is there a central repository or sticky that exists that has the poster name and date of [del]execution[/del] banning? Or do you post a locked thread when you feel it’s appropriate? I know I don’t visit ATMB frequently, so perhaps I just miss an announcement. Or, perhaps the policy isn’t iron clad… Do some folks not get their bannings posted in ATMB?
I don’t think I’d want to bother a mod about a particular person, but I don’t think starting a thread asking about a banned person is appropriate either.
You could always ask a mod or admin about a banned person if you’re wondering what brought on a specific user’s banning. We don’t mind being PMed, it sort of is expected sometimes with the job description.
Often when I’m reading an old thread, I’ll see all sorts of interesting, lively posters, and I think “My kind of people” and then I notice that they’ve all been banned.
vBulletin has a special control panel, only accessible to mods and admins, which we use for (among other things) banning or suspending users. It has a list of every banned user name. There are currently over 20,000 names on it.
The vast, vast majority of these are spam accounts.
A surprisingly large percentage of it is from a very small handful of absolutely bat-shit insane trolls. This guy was a frequent returnee here, and he wasn’t the most prolific of them by a long shot.
Then there are a bunch of people too stupid, hateful, angry, or immature to fit in here, and who flamed out pretty quickly. Basically, the random assholes, the emotionally imbalanced, and the kids whose parents should be paying better attention to their browser histories.
And lastly, there’s the prolific, regular posters who were banned. This is easily the smallest group of banned screen names, and it’s only members of this group who get ATMB announcements when they’re banned. We don’t keep a separate list of just the people in this group, and the master list on the mod control panel can’t be sorted by things like post count, or dates the poster was active, so there’s no way to pick out familiar names from the morass of spambots and lunatics that largely populate it, except scrolling through it by hand.
I think this has played a part. I have read my share of zombie threads lately, and only realized it after I noticed all the BANNED poster names. Very odd, actually. It’s almost like walking through a cemetery and recognizing people you used to know on the headstones. I think I DO see BANNED people. :eek:
In the earlier days of the board, before we went to the policy of banning a long-term poster only after a history of multiple warnings and a suspension (usually), we had a few bannees apply for reinstatement and be granted it. Frankly, it almost never worked out. No matter how sincere the request and promises to do better appeared, the same behavior problems that had prompted the original banning returned and the poster was banned again (or sometimes left on their own). On the list linked to in Zeldar’s post, Collounsbury was such a case.
Now that we have a multiple-step process for banning, it would make little sense to let someone back in. Anyone who gets banned these days has already established pretty well that they aren’t capable of abiding by the rules.
This said, we occasionally have mistakenly banned people for spamming or socking. Once it’s been established that it was a mistake they may be let back in.
The OP of that thread got banned.