yeah, but they deserved it
I found out making a sock puppet was a bannable offense AFTER I told people to do it. 
Wow. That guy is clearly insane. That said, I wish he could come back!
Really, he did? :eek:
He was new on the job and threw the wrong switch, took out the message board and most of Peoria, IL. It took a crew several hours to get everyone back online.
We celebrate the anniversary every year with a big parade and a party.
But we do it in secret, so he doesn’t feel back about it.
Everything Miller says here is accurate. I’ve said in the past that around 95% of my bans are spammers, and most of the rest are the crazy socks and trolls. “Real” Dopers are the smallest percentage by far.
He’s had more than 100 accounts here, it looks like. I thought it was only 60 or 70 but I think it’s more like 120. Of course he was also hitting lots of other sites and Twitter accounts and things. And yes, we’ve had worse. But even the crazy people who troll this place usually don’t have that kind of dedication. You need to be really crazy to devote that kind of time to spamming a message board where you know your posts are going to be removed within minutes.
So they say. (And yes, it was my first day as an admin.) Nobody on the staff has ever managed to explain how that happened and it’s never happened again, so I don’t know that I actually did anything wrong. But that doesn’t mean I’m ever going to live it down. 
We generally ban only around a dozen “real” members (non-spammers, socks, or short-term trolls) per year, out of 7,000+ active members. The vast majority of our posters never receive any warnings or have any other problems here.
Why do you think he’s called the Administerminator?
I have wondered how did he manage to do this. Some inadvertent Ctrl-C ?
He tried to feed the hamsters to the squid…
Not to disagree with my colleague (who is fabulous in every way) but i don’t think the number is even that high. I would say half that or even less.
Banning of members – especially long time Dopers – is unusual and rare.
The overwhelming percentage of registered users who get banned are spammers. Followed by “trolls,” posters who have an outside agenda, and people who are unclear on the concept. I suspect most of the last group have some problems of some sort, mental illness/emotional disorder, maybe. But even those are not so frequent, though we do seem to have spells when it seems like there’s more of them on the ground, like the first daffodils of spring..
Posters in good standing – especially paid members – tend to be exemplary members of the community and don’t even get warnings. Those few that have been warned have usually only been warned once and it never happens again. It’s rare when someone with history here runs the table to get to the ban place.
I did a search on threads with “Banned” in the title in ATMB for the last 12 months, and there were about a dozen I would consider to fall in the category of “real” members. A few of those might have been considered trolls.
Several of them I can think of that merited notice in ATMB were not long time members but had become so notorious in their short term Doper experience that the situation required mention. So there. 
Real-life banning of members of the Straight Dope community are uncommon. Though there are some that seem to carry an attitude that their own banning is inevitable. I’ve never quite understood that and sometimes wondered what they were up to.
I too was (am) weirded out by the all-caps “BANNED” under the username. I’m relatively new here.
Or is it one poster I see who’s fucking around by using that word for his optional description?
Or, it’s about a bannee who is readmitted? And has to wear a scarlet letter? (Analogy only. No statement to decision.)
ETA: This in response to Colibri a post or two up. So there are people who are unbanned. And they get the all-caps seen under their username?
Well, I get it now. Saw Simple Linctus and pchaos announcement and looked at originating threads.
More like an asterisk next to Mark McGuire’s name, sort of: for future historians.
this guy… Isn’t the article granting him the attention he desires? I know you aren’t responsible for the article, but I imagine he’s thrilled to be an article in wiki.
I can’t help but wonder what he was trolling the SDMB for. And to sign up over 100+ times? That’s an obsession I can’t grasp. How do these people maintain jobs?
Did he ever threaten or stalk anyone on the dope? And what caused him to get his first ban?
Member since 2009? You aren’t that new here!
This was discussed much more recently than that, right here in ATMB. (The practice of using “BANNED” for your description.) Sometime within the last year, IIRC. (I’ll see if I can find it.)
The conclusion was: Using “BANNED”, or anything that looks confusingly similar, for your description, is “BANNED”.
I think this was it.
Discussion of using BANNED or anything similar for your username or description.
(Missed edit window.) (Again.)
Also discussed here:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=15506609#post15506609