To my mind, Ban has always meant permanent.
“You’re banned from this place! You’ll never be allowed in again!”
While I’ve always thought of Suspend as being temporary.
“You’re being suspended from school for 1 week, over fighting.”
Ban:
- to prohibit especially by legal means
- bar entry
- to debar temporarily especially from a privilege, office, or function
- a: to cause to stop temporarily
b: to set aside or make temporarily inoperative - to defer to a later time on specified conditions
- to hold in an undetermined or undecided state awaiting further information
When I hear someone mention they were banned my reaction is: “Holy shit! WTF did you do to earn that!” Then I find out it was only for a day or three: “Oh… That’s not a Ban! That’s minor. Go touch grass. You’ll be fine.”
I’ve been banned from subreddits and communities a few times. At least once I never even noticed because it was so short.
How is it a Ban if I didn’t even notice?
Why did Ban in online forums and games, come to mean temporary?
Is it simply an example of the intensification of language? To make something mundane, seem more severe than it is?
Does it bother anyone else? Or am I alone here?
Online there’s basically 3 levels of ban, temp ban, ban, and permaban.
Temp ban, the offender is not allowed to interact temporarily usually for a set amount of time before its automatically lifted, they get put in timeout for a bit.
Ban, more permanent sibling of the temp ban, doesn’t automatically lift after a set amount of time, can be lifted manually by admin/mods, usually leaves one possible channel of comms open for the offender to make appeals to the admins/mods. They’ve been kicked out of the bar, they’re not allowed back, but maybe in a while management will soften their stance.
Permaban, you do not pass go, you do not collect 200, you’re permanently gone, no take backs, these are basically never undone and basically no one except for the highest level of admins can undo it. You dun fucked up, the bar’s management is beyond pissed at you and you will never ever be back again, bouncers have your photo and it is damn near on sight with them.
It seems like most people conflate temp ban and regular ban. They’re both pretty common and the difference between them is basically one has an automatic timer so calling something a ban, temporary or regular just gets called a ban.
Which is why I’m implying (and now flatly saying) a Temp Ban should be renamed to a Suspension. For clarity.
I agree and in most services a temporary restriction of an account is called a suspension (though colloquially terms like “3 day ban” have become common).
Banning usually involves deleting or locking the user out of the account in an irrevocable manner.
And what’s to stop people from still saying “I got banned” even when it’s called a suspension?
This feels a lot like the “We have 15 different cable standards, let’s make a universal one!” creates new cable standard “We have 16 different cable standards now…” situation.
Even if the language we currently use is slightly ambiguous, one or two questions clears up the ambiguity and still gets across the idea of “I can’t post right now.” And comparatively asking an extra question sounds a lot easier than reworking something culturally ingrained in our lexicon.
My original question wasn’t about changing anything at this point. It was about when and why this change in usage happened.
But with all the push back saying I’m actually wrong, I’ve instead been forced into a place where I have to defend the dictionary.
I’m not arguing for a new standard. I’m saying there was a standard, and somehow we got off it; And are now we’re in a place of ambiguity.
That’s just how language works. It changes and morphs as time goes on and culture leaders change. And in my last, idk 20 or so years on the internet I’ve never really seen the word suspension used. It’s always been temp ban, ban or permaban.