Chip NoVaMac said:
Just out of curiosity, do you mean something of the "you are an idiot" variety, or something else? Hmmm, just curiosity I guess. I guess I can even stomach that, as long as there are no explicit, intentional racial / ethnic / sexual orientation slurs, I'm pretty happy. The only time I felt hurt by one-such, it wasn't intentional, and the person edited it out right away when I complained. So even that wasn't so bad.
The only time I know of, where I explicitly pissed someone off here, I went back and edited out what I had said and put a sorry in its place. And then he was banned for some unrelated reason a week later. So I guess I win and I don't have to feel too too bad.
EDIT: Oh, I wanted to add...I have reservations about the "keep it between the mod and the user" view. I mod somewhere else, where I have the ability to delete posts or edit content out, but not to ban people. There can quickly be a flame war and bad feelings if the reason for a ban is stated, but OTOH, if it is done silently, there are also a lot of hurt feelings, and it puts a damper on the whole community, because people start to get paranoid and believe bans are arbitrary and high-handed, and they don't feel comfortable participating anymore, either because they're afraid of being banned or because the seeming irrationality of the action (because they don't know the reason) puts them off.
So I guess my view is that it is beneficial to state briefly why a person was banned, just for the whole group. No invective, not necessarily even discussion. Perhaps even a closed thread that just gets opened by a mod to add a post saying something like "X was banned because she violated the following rule: she poked a badger with a spoon."
