I think the system we have now is pretty good, although I want to point out that it’s informal and I don’t see a lot of upside in formalizing it. For people who have been here a while, we almost always suspend them before we ban. Even though a suspension is officially supposed to be your last chance, people who are back from suspension usually get multiple warnings before they’re banned because we don’t want to rush to pull the plug on people. We give people a lot of chances to show they’re improving. I don’t think adding extra steps is necessary and I don’t see it doing much good.
Very long suspensions are pretty much de facto bans anyway. Whether you say the poster is banned forever or suspended for a year, the underlying fact is that the poster is evidently unable to follow the rules here. And if you have a poster who does stick around after that many suspensions, I think that system gives them chance after chance to act up - something they have already done many times - while making it tougher for us to ban them once it’s clear things are not working out.
Say we have a poster who’s been warned many times and is suspended for a month. He comes back and gets warned again, which means he could be disrupting a thread or goading someone into insulting him. Then he gets suspended for three months and comes back and does the same thing. That’s another thread thrown off track and another possible warning to another poster. Then he gets a six-month suspension, and after that…
What is the SDMB gaining from this? Additional threads get derailed, multiple people may get warned, and all of that for someone who has been warned 10 or 20 times, which is more than enough times to know they’re not a good fit for the board.
As far as subjectivity goes, yes, moderating is subjective. There are a lot of judgment calls, and I don’t think anybody has said otherwise. It’s possible that some of gonzomax’s warnings could have been mod notes instead, although if you go down that road I think you have to acknowledge that some of the many mod notes he received could have been warnings instead. As it is, some of his warnings were not exactly borderline: