[karajorma]

The Thread of Shame was the rather informal name for it.

What it's basically meant to do is to cover the reasons behind formal warnings. Not the discussions, those will and should remain private, but if a user is banned we should have a place where other people can see what they were banned for. The Global mods will already know we do this internally already. There are a lot of posts on the global mod board saying "This user was monkeyed for a week for his actions on this thread" so the only change is to make an external version. But when someone like High Max gets banned for the straw that broke the camel's back, we can point at the Thread of Shame and say "Here's all the rest of the straw, here's a long list of examples of you making this forum a worse place to visit. That's why you're banned."

[Goober5000]

Some kind of appeals system may be worth considering (I'm neither here nor there, would depend in large part on how it actually ended up playing out). But if it could be posted on by permabanned users, that leaves a big hole, not just for banned users to continue acting like dicks, but also for banned spambots to keep exploiting the system.

While appeals for most other punishments might be appropriate, I think permabans are generally used so rarely, and as a last resort generally following other appealable events that losing the right to appeal them isn't such a great loss.

It's important to distinguish between "full bans", which are complete restrictions on any HLP access whatsoever, and "permabans", which are bans that are never lifted.  The first is about scope, the second is about duration.  They are too often conflated.

It's worth noting that in a "full ban", a user can't even read the boards, which means that he's not going to know why he was banned unless it appears in the ban message or is communicated to him some other way.

[Colonol Dekker]

Might we look to my own banning back in the day as an example of the system working?