This is kind of like the question “if a random person gets a first DUI, what are the odds of that person being an alcoholic”?
Yeah, kinda. Mr. DUI has a greater chance of being an alcoholic than the average person, but the question is: “How much greater?”
Let’s see if I can sum up what’s been said. The odds of a random poster being banned is zero.
The odds that certain types of personalities who post heavily in certain forums on certain subjects will be banned approach and reach 100 with time.
The odds that the rest of us will be banned, however long we stay here, remain close to zero.
I know many people will disagree, but I see this as a good thing.
Sorry–to be more specific: “What % of posters will be banned within 3 years of their first warning?” Or whatever.
I’m not real anxious about this. I just want to be clear. That’s all.
Actuarially. There is no way any of us has the time to crunch numbers on this, but if you break it down, the mods probably hand out a warning every couple of days on average. And we ban a few people per year for insults and being a jerk. It follows that even among people who get a warning, very few get banned.
The vast majority of people who are banned from the board are spammers who have zero posts or one post. No individual poster accounts for more than about 0.35 percent of the posts on the SDMB. So while it depends on how you define “a significant portion,” the answer is probably not.
Can’t give you a specific number – we have no way to track this kind of data.
But most people who get a warning – usually at the beginning of things when they’re not so good on the rules of the road – at least 95% of those people never get another warning. They learn and do better and that’s the end of it.
Most of our posters here have no warnings at all, ever.
To get banned from the board in your early days you’re most likely a spammer or a sock. Otherwise it takes some work to get from Warning to Banning – with a suspension throw in along the way.
The chance of being banned does rise with the number of Warnings collected – every case is different and is adjudicated accordingly but someone who is Banned has usually accumulated a pantload of warnings AND been counseled without official warning AND has been suspended. More often than not the Banned person has ignored all of the counseling and all of the Warnings and tends to commit the same offense over and over again. There’s also the “Death by Mod” factor – some feel the need to be removed from the Board in a messy public way.
To sum up with some WAGs:
Your odds if you’re a spammer – close to 100%.
Your odds if you’re a sock – hard to say for sure, but we catch most of them. Eventually.
Your odds if you’re a regular poster – I’m good with that 1% number. It just doesn’t happen that often.
I think it’s also likely that posts in certain forums are more likely to generate problems, and that posters don’t split there time evenly between all the forums. I’ve got around 1500 posts on the board, and I don’t think a single one has been in Great Debates or The Pit. I suspect there are some who post there almost exclusively.
I think your perception is also skewed because many of the older threads that people will remember (why did you look up that old thread instead of another? because it was mentioned that a banned poster was in it!) are the controversial ones, those that generated a lot of heat. And in those there is a good chance that you will find posters that are drawn to the heat like a moth to the flame.
I noticed that the thread you linked to was thread 223724. Look up a sample of threads in the same time frame: threads 223723, 223722, 223721, 223725, 223726, 223727, etc. Try 20 threads on each side for example (threads 223704 to 223744), count the number of distinct poster names, and then count the number of distinct banned poster names. The percentage of banned posters that you calculate as a result might give you a better estimate of how many posters get banned.
I had a quick look at the numbers since we instituted the automated warning system in June 2008, which make things easier to quantify. In just over 20 months, the moderators as a group have issued a bit over 200 warnings, for a warning every three days on average.
Of people who received any warnings during that time, 77% had only a single warning, accounting for 53% of all warnings. The remaining 23%, with multiple warnings, accounted for 47% of all warnings.
We’ve banned or suspended only a minority of posters with multiple warnings during this time. While I haven’t tried to quantify this, I think we may end up bannning about 5% of posters who have warnings. Of course, as has been mentioned, the vast majority of posters never receive any warnings at all.
As a scientist and a stats geek, this was my first instinct. Then my conscience kicked in and said "start a thread, ask the mods and get back to work, you slacker, you’re not gonna publish a paper called “Modelling the clustering of banned users on an internet discussion board.”
Mate, we both know that papers have been published on far more obscure topics.
Oh, yeah, but not on this topic, by me. My CV already looks like I have the attention span of
There was one thread referenced awhile back which had like 3 different banned posters in it, all of them socks of each other. And in some cases they either argued with each other, or even (mistakenly!) responded as the wrong persona (to something said to one of the other ones).
For a moment there I thought you got banned before you could finish your sentence 
Now wouldn’t that have made this thread one for the times 
Nah, he was just warned not to finish that sentence… and doesn’t want to be one of the “warning-to-ban” statistics!
Sorry, what? Oh.
…a gnat.
I can’t remember the poster now, but someone about 3-6 years ago came up with the most amazing statics of posters. He was a geek also. I’ll try to find it later.
Warmgun = Darkcool = Hombre = Don’t Fight The Hypothetical
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=91107
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=1759371
I’ve just been reminded that the current infraction system was implemented in about June 2009 rather than June 2008, which makes the rate about one warning a day. The other figures I mentioned are not affected by this correction.
Pareto’s Law aka the 20-80 rule strikes again.
…except that Pareto jams 80% of the effect into 20% of the sample, while here “only” half of the warnings are produced by the ~20% subset of posters who have multiple warnings.