Infractions and Bans - Reasons?

WHERE THIS IDEA / SUGGESTION CAME FROM

I got a 7-day ban last week and I've been thinking hard and searching the rules, posts, etc since day 1 to find what I may have done to receive a straight 10 infraction points but couldn't figure out what it might be. So I thought I'd just have to wait until the ban expires and see the reason in my User CP page.

Yesterday when the ban expired there seemed to be some DB issues and I still couldn't login, but that's a different story. Today when I finally can access my User CP page, I'm quite disappointed that the 'Post' is just shown as 'Private' (I understand that it means it has been deleted), and the 'Reason' is just written as '7-Day Buy/Sell/Trade Ban'.


THE PROBLEMS

First of all I was banned from the whole forum, not just Buy/Sale/Trade, so the "reason" is incorrect.

Secondly, if the purpose of the bans / infractions is to deter future offences, shouldn't the reasons be made more easily accessible and understandable?

I've seen the argument about if we don't switch the option to receive notifications from admin via email it's our fault. I don't have that option switched on so I'm not sure whether there's more detailed ban/infraction reasons there. But either way, there's still a few problems with this argument:

1. If you want to make this as the only means of communication, it should at least be made the default option, or probably even shouldn't be able to be switched off. Or the other way around (I'm not sure which decission was made first), if the email notification is optional, it shouldn't be chosen as the only means of communication.

2. If the purpose of the bans / infraction points is to deter future offences, giving a ban without understandable reasons would have no useful effects. The potential outcomes are:
a. Users will reoffend and moderators will have more works and headaches.
b. Users will be discouraged to post and become less active in the forum, the forum's growth slows.


SUGGESTION

It should be very easy to write a few words describing why the ban / infractions were given. "Improper language". "Duplicate threads". "Thread bumping". Or even just copy and paste the offending post if it's short.

I still don't know what offence I made so don't know how hard it is to describe and type, but typing '7-Day Buy/Sale/Trade Ban' surely takes some effort though useless. The red dot thingo already tells me I was banned and it's more important to know why I was banned rather than how long I was banned for.


NOTE: I'm not complaining about me getting banned here, just using my case as the only example available for me.

 

The reason is not incorrect. It doesn't mean you're banned from BST - it means you were banned for violating the BST rules found in the BST announcement.

If you had admin emails enabled, you could have seen the post even though it's deleted - the post the infraction was given on can be found there in full.

It's also pretty self-explanatory. The announcement has been around for months now, so there's no excuse for people to not know about it. You may not post just to express interest in an offer. That's what you did in your post - "I'd like one as well please. Thanks."

Exactly how else should we be contacting rule-breakers just to tell them they broke the rules? We have far too much to do to track down alternative communication methods for those members. No thanks. If they really cared about knowing the reasons, they'd have left the admin email settings alone (I'm pretty positive having it off is not the default, so you would have had to turn it off).

So the solution to all your problems is simple - go adjust your settings and next time you will get the notification with details (when appropriate) and the text of your actual post.