Banning is forever. Suspensions have an end date.
When they are paid to do that job then you’d probably have more of a leg to stand on, bitch wise. They are volunteers after all and, IIRC, they get ‘paid’ for putting up with all of us by receiving a coffee mug and the warm, heartfelt thanks of folks like you for the job they do. 
-XT
Unless successfully appealed, or otherwise rescinded.
Diogenes the Cynic might have been better known for other things - for being stubborn and not conceding when he was wrong, but example - but that’s not against the rules on its own. He did have several warnings for personal insults, as well as a few for being a jerk or ignoring the mods.
There are options, yes. We do sometimes do shorter suspensions of a week or two weeks for multiple rules violations. A few times we’ve suspended someone for 24 hours to give them time to cool off after a single indicent. tomndebb has done this a couple of times that I can think of; I’ve only done it once but I think it works in the right situation.
We don’t take bannings lightly, but I don’t think pushing someone that hard to “wander away” is really preferable to a ban. If we’re going to get someone to stop posting I’m fine with calling it what it is.
I can imagine the GQ mods endorsing this idea. 
I think this is probably doable but we could look at it, but I’m not sure it’s necessary. I think that generally, if someone acts like a jerk or insults people, they tend to do it in multiple forums and not just one. I don’t think we’ve ever particularly kept track of this kind of thing in the past, so it’s hard to say if it would really matter. Some posters tend to hang out in just one forum and I think most prefers some forums over others, so they might have most of their warnings in one forum and few in others, but that reflects their posting habits and doesn’t necessarily mean they have trouble with the rules in one forum.
I consider myself about as obnoxious a poster as I would tolerate on a message board, and I have no warnings. Zip, zero, nada. Honestly, I am tired of people who clamber after their rights to be obnoxious on these boards. It tires me. If you can’t avoid being ten times the jerk I am (and I can be one hell of a jerk), you need help.
The real world has a three strikes law, why not here?
I think it’s pretty clear that you guys prefer to keep things the way they are, which is fine, but since my post is in the OP and you appear to be responding to something like it, I’d just like to clarify a couple of things:
- The idea is *not *to add another layer of punishment between the current [some number of warnings] and [lifetime banishment]. The idea is to replace some/most of those warnings with temporary posting restrictions of varying length. Again, not for your trolls/spammers, but for your long-time posters who occasionally cross the line.
Yes, it won’t fix everything – some people will still shrug it off and keep breaking the rules. So eventually you ban them, just like you do now. But some people will remember how sick they got of logging in day after day and not being able to respond to threads they otherwise would, and decide it’s just not worth calling the guy they’re currently arguing with a dickbag.
An analogy: say there is some really nice parking right next to your workplace. It’s always empty and parking enforcement rarely goes by. So sometimes when you’re running late, you park there. And every now and again, you get a note on your windshield saying you can’t park there. You know that if you get eight or nine notes (or six or fourteen or maybe twenty), you’ll get fired, but you’ve only got four right now, so why stop parking there? Now imagine if every time you got busted, you weren’t allowed to park anywhere in the town you work in for some length of time. Even if you weren’t close to getting fired, it would become less attractive to risk it, given that it could mean taking the bus and walking the last half mile.
- On an unrelated topic: in my personal opinion, it’s ridiculous to ever banish any long-term poster forever over a minor rule infraction. Not all crimes merit prison time, no matter what a person’s previous record is. Calling someone a “blind righty” in GD? Come on.
(Please note that I am in no way upset that gonzomax is gone: he was a terrible poster who typed like a Muppet on crack. But if we want to get rid of terrible posters, just add an asterisk to the rules saying that the mods will occasionally vote someone off the island who is annoying the piss out of everybody and dispense with the pretense.)
To restrict someone to an area or, conversely, to ban them from just an area is not useful. There’s nothing to keep them from continuing bad behavior where they can post, regardless. That’s not a satisfactory solution to the problem.
We’re not going to go down this road.
Has there ever been an instance where a poster said something so outrageous, illegal or jerkish that he was banned in one – no suspension, no warning?
I know it’s done with socks and spam, but what about someone who just asked for it.
That’s not what we do.
The process as it stands now always holds out hope that the user will do better, will change their ways. We give them the benefit of the doubt for a long, long time and we try to work with them to get them to change. How they handle this is up to them.
Again, let me point out that we’re talking about a tiny segment of the user population. Most people on this board never get warned at all. Most of those that do get warned have one warning, shape up, and that’s the end of the problem. They never get warned again because they follow the rules.
It’s a tiny, tiny group that take it all the way to the bitter end.
Why should everyone else have to put up with extended crap from this tiny bit of the population? To ask them to hold still for more of the same is actually unfair to them and adversely affects their experience. The good users of this board deserve better.
As for your other proposal … man, that’s just wrong.
We’ve had people attempt to hack the site. They got banned immediately.
We’ve had people threaten to take legal action. They got banned immediately as well.
These are very rare things but over the course of our history these things have happened.
Here is the reason I am for a suspension, a long suspension, then a couple year suspension. In hindsight what I was thinking was this. The problem IMO is really that the first suspension is just too short. The poster with a month or two suspension can just “tough it out”. They don’t really get the feel for what it would be like to never post on the SDMB again. Make it six months to a year and THEN they would get the idea of what that part of their life being gone would be like. Also, if they are having problems in their life making them a bit more jerky than normal those problems are quite likely still around in a month or two. And then there are those posters who don’t like the suspended poster. If its just a month or two later, those posters are probably still a bit pissed at the jerk and are much more likely to bait/poke at em with a stick than they would be if a longer period of time has gone by.
So, maybe at the least make the first suspension significantly longer?
Man, if you can’t learn or change after multiple warnings and a suspension, what is going to work? And why should the rest of the community have to put up with it?
Dragging this out – potentially for years – I don’t see the use in this.
An insult is an insult, and he had double digit warnings for insults. Saying that the last one wasn’t a big deal misses the point. With posters like this, we sometimes have a tendency to give extra chances (as I did when I gave gonzomax a note instead of a warning over the weekend), and when that happens, it usually creates headaches for us without providing any benefit to the board.
I suspect that’s because you (understandably) only see things from the enforcement side. To you, having to hand out and track warnings is a nuisance, and you’d just as soon have fewer nuisances to deal with. It makes sense: I’m sure some police officers wish they could just banish certain people from town after their third or fourth call to the same residence for the same domestic dispute.
But from a poster perspective, some posters add far more value with their posts than they detract with occasional slip-ups. Case in point: Diogenes called someone a fuckhead in IMHO, then posted immediately afterward saying he had thought the thread was in the Pit and apologizing. Did that significantly detract from many people’s message board experience? I doubt it. But for you guys, it was another reported post you had to look at, another judgment call you had to make, and you decided enough was enough. No one would argue that in an ideal world, posters would all just follow the rules. But since we live in an imperfect world, easing the burdens of enforcement have to be balanced against the consequences.
I’m well aware that the changes I proposed would not necessarily make modding more enjoyable, particularly for the staff who are sick of dealing with rule-breakers. But I do think that they have the potential to make modding more effective, and to make posting more enjoyable for the community as a whole. Which, IMO, should be the top priority.
Okay fine, but what do you think about making the first suspension something that really hurts? Do you dissagree with my point that a one month one is not going to feel as nearly “real” as a six month one? Some small fraction of people can change but the punishment really needs to hurt for them to “get it”.
You have this if the person WON’T change:
Jerk Jerk Jerk, one month suspension, Jerk Jerk Jerk, Banned or
Jerk Jerk Jerk, six month suspension, Jerk Jerk Jerk, Banned
Either way other posters get exposed to total same amount of Jerkdom till the poster is banned. I am just arguing that with the second method there is a small but slightly higher chance the poster will change for the better. And an upside of the six month one is that a poster who was suspended and really doesn’t care about this board one way or another probably won’t even come back after six months anyway.
Then again, I don’t really care either way. Just throwing that out as a suggestion.
Or ban them if they show no signs of changing for the better after one recent suspension and, if they want back in after a year or so, they can ask nicely.
I think you guys acted perfectly consistently with past board tradition in the case of gonzomax. It was simply the lightness of the final offense that prompted me to pontificate that perhaps we could use more shades of grey. Just my personal opinion, feel free to take it for what it’s worth.
While I would have argued for more leniency (or for waiting for a more clear-cut infraction before pouncing) in some of the bannings I’ve seen, I have served as an administrator for a (much smaller and entirely unrelated) web community, and making things as straightforward as possible for the volunteers is in fact good policy, if you want to have volunteers. If it’s dazzlingly complex, people won’t want to do it. And although I value individual judgment, if a practice is too subjective, someone will always be found to disagree with it. So, although clear rules and consistent enforcement veer towards undesirable rigidity, they remain useful enough principles to be worth striving toward.
Constantly second-guessing or undercutting the volunteers is also a bad idea.
For someone who posts on a daily basis, I think a month is plenty of time to make that point. Considering how much trouble you have to go to to get enough warnings to be suspended for a month, I don’t think the problem is that the poster is not getting the message. It’s that he’s unwilling or unable to change. So I don’t think the problem is the message, it’s the person who is (not) receiving the message.