This has nothing to do with the recent kerfluffle. Rather, a recent thread that was derivative of a derivative of the kerfluffle, mentioned a poster who had been banned for posting on medical topics after being told not to. I glanced over the thread, and yes, the poster mentioned is banned during the thread. However, the surprising part was, in a 2 page thread from 2003, [thread=223724] a total of four of the participants are currently banned[/thread]
I realize that a lot of people stop posting, but I’m kind of amazed at how many posters wind up being banned. Do we have any stats on this? What are the odds of an random poster winding up banned?
That depends on who the fucking hall monitor is 
Mathematically, I can tell you this much: Your odds of being banned are significantly less than 1%.
-xash
Administrator
Wow, that thread does seem to have been populated by a lot of ne’er-do-wells*! Pure chance, as it happens. Most old threads are populated by regular guests, I’d imagine. Though I’ll be curious to see what some of the current trainwrecky threads will look like in a year. 
Anyway, most people here aren’t jerks, so the odds are pretty small of your average poster being banned, as xash says.
- In case you’re curious, a quick look reminded me that Dogface was banned for using hate speech, DreadCthulhu for insisting on role-playing in disruptive way after being warned, and vanilla repeatedly dragged real-life fights onto the board – actually, IIRC, she was banned a second time when she came back as a sock. Ah, those were the days!
Hm. Interesting. There certainly are some threads that have a disproportionate number of banned participants when one comes back to them. I wonder if there are certain threads that attract a cast of characters that, in retrospect, wind up being…I dunno, ban-fodder?
I appreciate that the question is ever so slightly sensitive, so it was nice of you to give me some kind of answer. Thanks.
Got a kick out of the thread title / username combo: What are the odds of a random Attack from the 3rd dimension
I’ve noticed the same thing re-reading old threads. I think it’s partially due to the fact that a lot of banned posters prefer to burn out rather than fade away. This leads them to post often in a given thread. The other factor is a network effect, posters with a banning in their future recognize their own and tend to respond to each other.
I don’t mean to challenge your analysis (too much) but I think it’s a safe bet that some banned posters posted in the same kinds of threads, and hence finding a thread with multiple banned posters isn’t a truly random event. Put more generally, poster distribution isn’t random because of self-selection.
Yes. In my experience, that’s fairly common.
When I come back, I’m coming back as a shoe . . .
(not that i’m planning to leave, or to give anyone a reason to ask me to, for the record!)
I would tend to agree with what’s been said - in other forums I’ve been on, I’ve seen posters who almost begged to be banned and would go out of their way to provoke action.
However, I haven’t seen a lot of banning or bannable people here - which is why i’ve stuck around. It’s nice to play with adults for a change . . .
In recent years, my “best guess” is that somewhere between one in 500 and one in 1000 regular posters get banned in any one year. This of course does not count socks, spammers, or short term trolls. I have no estimate on the proportion of bannings in the earlier years of the board.
Looking at older threads can give a inaccurate estimate of the total number of banned posters among the general population. It’s like looking back at the Big Bang: the universe was smaller then, and some of the larger stars back then have now burned out. At the time he was banned, handy had the largest number of posts of any poster on the board because he made short drive-by posts in threads on almost any subject. Therefore a rather large percentage of all threads from that era have posts by handy, and will show at least one banned poster. Likewise, a couple of the other posters in that thread had high post counts.
Banning today is a rare event on a per-poster basis. The average poster never receives a single official warning, much less is in jeopardy of being banned.
Wow, I actually thought of starting this thread yesterday. Like you, I was looking at some old threads (going back to 2004) I got through the search function and noticed how many people were banned. It really seemed a disappropriate number of people.
I had no analysis. The goal of the exercise was to have the mods do the hard work.
In all seriousness, I appreciate the fact that you people who actually have the information were kind enough to think about it and propose some hypotheses.
Aw, come on. She was a good egg.
I’m seeing this “less than 1%” figure bandied about, but, like others here, I see the “banned” designation on a disproportionate number of posts from past threads.
My resulting hypothesis is that, as posters generate more traffic (particularly in contentious topic areas) their risk of committing infractions also increases, as does their likelihood of using sock puppets and what not. Put another way, a prolific, passionate poster is more likely to be banned than an occasional poster. Thus, a great deal of the Dope’s more forcefully argued posts have been authored by people who are now banned.
An interesting statistic I’d like to see is the total number of SDMB posts authored by posters who are now banned.
That’s true, but it’s kind of a given if you think about it. And it also takes time for a poster to build up enough infractions to get banned unless he or she is just trolling.
When we have discussions like these I generally say that we ban around six people per year for insulting people and otherwise being a jerk, as distinct from spammers and from socks. That’s based on the two years I’ve been doing this. I’m not sure how it compares to years past, but I took a quick glance at some past ATMB threads and I don’t think it’s changed much lately. But there must be dozens of people with more posts than handy by now, and I think only of them have been banned. So it’s not really about how prolific and passionate you are. To the degree that we can chalk this up to passion and not old fashioned rudeness, it’s about how often you go over the line when posting on subjects you’re passionate about.
Missing a numerator in there.
And you are right, but that’s the equivalent of saying that carelessness causes traffic accidents. It does, but when you’re figuring odds, it’s more expeditious to calculate by miles driven than to hunt down careless driving habits.
Then again, it’s also statistically true that infractions on one’s driving record do tend to predict auto accidents. Perhaps another statistic of interest would be: “What proportion of posters are still around in a year after their first warning? In five years?”
It should also be noted that there is a subset of the internet population as a whole that tends to disability of one kind or the other, especially mental illness. These people are unable to work and are not often tasked with other responsibilities – they just can’t handle those kinds of things. A lot of them are homebound for one reason or another.
For these people the internet is their window on the world and their entire life. They have nothing but time to read message boards and make postings all day.
Some of them have deep feelings about certain subjects – mania, even – that makes them problematic posters.
We have had more than our share of these people visit us over the years. And most of them – probably all of them, ultimately – wind up banned. They can’t hang here, whatever it is that keeps them from holding down a job, etc. makes them unfit to be members of the community. So that skews things as well.
Signing up here is no guarantee of sticking around.
People come here for a lot of different reasons and get different outcomes from their SDMB experience. For many it’s just to get an answer to a particular question – they ask it, they get it, that’s it, they’re gone. For some they get sent a link to something interesting, they read it, they read other stuff, they get hooked, they make this place part of their surfing habits.
A few come here, feel like they’ve come home, and settle in.
And the circumstances around people’s lives change all the time – people have time to hang out here and then they don’t. They get busy at work, they have responsibilities at home, they get married, they have kids, they go back to school, they pick up other leisure activities. People drop in and out all the time.
I would suspect the rise of the social networking sites has taken a chunk out of traffic for everything else on the internet as well.
Traffic to the site is also affected by work and social policies – a lot of people in the greater Straight Dope community report that their access to the site is blocked by IP rules at work. Software programs like Net Nanny are in use at companies, in schools, at public libraries, and what used to be open access to the Dope is now restricted.
Getting warned once is not an indication someone will be banned eventually.
Are you saying this actuarially, or does this reflect your moderating philosophy?
I’m assuming the latter, which is all well and good, but the statistician in me would love to know the proportion of posters who are still around three years (or whatever time period) after their first warning.
And, dadgummit, it WOULD be darned fascinating to know the percentage of posts written by posters now banned. Is it tenable to suggest that a significant portion of our discourse–perhaps some of our best–is generated by people whose temperments do not suit them for contribution over a sustained period?