The du_hast screen name was already banned, I banned airdisc this afternoon.
It’s important to remember that we don’t have the rules we have here to play “gotcha” with you. We have them because we think they help make the board the sort of place people would like to spend time at. We’d much rather have a poster active here, making posts and contributing to the board culture, then to have another poster with BANNED under his name.
The “no socks” rule has a reputation as one of the hardest rules on the board, but that’s somewhat misleading. There’s a couple of different scenarios here.
Generally, if we find out that a poster who hasn’t been on our radar before has multiple accounts, we don’t insta-ban them. We contact them to see what’s up, and if they’ve got a reasonable explanation, we usually just merge up the accounts and leave them with whichever screen name they prefer. In this case, TMwtGG specifically asked to have his posting priviledges rescinded, so I went ahead and did that - perhaps a bit precipitously, hence Tuba’s correction.
Often, when we have a poster who appears to be trolling, and we find out that they had a sock account. That’s taken as confirmation that their new account is, in fact, a troll, and not an earnest idiot. Rarely, it turns out that the troll account was created by a poster who was otherwise in good standing. Since we’re banning users, and not screen names, both accounts get the axe. In situations like that, I believe we’d usually announce the reason - although I can’t recall any examples of it happening off the top of my head.
Lastly, we have habitual returnees. You may recall reading about David Mabus, who was a frequent sock puppeteer on the SDMB. There’s only a very small handful of people who fall into this category, but they represent the overwhelming majority of banned sock puppets. In some cases, literally thousands of them. 90% of the time, when you see that someone’s sock had been banned with no discussion, it’s because it’s yet another SN from one of about five or six known head-cases. We try to make this place as unattractive as possible for those types, and since they seem to crave attention, we don’t discuss the specifics of their bannings publicly.