I’m not talking about anyone in particular, but the most recent one inspired the question:
When someone gets banned, do the mods email the person, advising them of it? Does it depend on the infraction? Do they get the opportunity to appeal?
We do not e-mail the person.
They do not get an opportunity to appeal.
We don’t just ban people out of the blue. If someone gets banned, they’ve generally had warnings before and have a proven history of refusing to follow the rules. With the exception of drive-by trolls and spammers, we also generally have discussed the person’s posting habits at length in the mod loop and have come to a consensus that no other form of discipline is likely to work to correct the behavior that triggered the ban discussion in the first place.
In short, if someone gets banned, they had plenty of opportunities to change their behavior long before the ban, and refused to do so.
I’m assuming there’s no long discussion of sock puppets either, yes?
That’s generally correct, though there have been some exceptions. We’ve had cases where someone has had problems with their account and instead of contacting us to resolve it like they should have done, they just created a sock instead. We don’t want to punish people for having a problem, even if they handle it wrong. So there are probably exceptions for every rule.
Well, most rules. One case where there are no exceptions is if you threaten legal action. That gets you an insta-ban and we forward everything to Ed (who sends it on to the lawyers) and then we’re not allowed to even discuss the matter further.