Banned?

I'm curious. As I go through old threads, I see posts by folks whose names have been greyed out. I'm guessing these are people who have quit, or been banned, etc.

The thing that makes me most curious, is that sometimes the number of posts by that person shows "0" (when obviously they made at least that one post), and sometimes it's a real number. So, what's the difference?

And while I'm asking, what are the likely causes of being banned? Are they all just violations of the "be nice" directive? None of the posts that I've seen from these folks has been obviously trollish.

You created your account a coupla months ago and your account number is 178074. So we are closing in on about 200,000 users.

Most bans are for spam.

The stuff with the grayed out name is usually from accounts from before the naming convention and those people never updated their account. So we just grayed out the name.

People getting banned for being nasty is pretty rare. Maybe five or six per year. This site has been around about ten years, so that's about one person every 4000.

I think it is fair to say that the people that get banned for being nasty think that I am mean and nasty and that they are lovely. So this site is just not a good fit for them. They can still post in lots of other places on the internet.

And I am pretty sure that about half of the people that get banned quietly create a new account and are nice with their new account.

None of the posts that I've seen from these folks has been obviously trollish.

That's because anything awful is removed.

Thanks, Paul!