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?
Probably because “Ban” is shorter & easier to write
To my mind, Ban has always meant permanent.
I’m not sure where you got that association from. Even the dictionary definition you gave says nothing about permanence.
It says nothing about time at all. It doesn’t say it’s limited in any way.
Net terminology just changed over time.
It used to be, both in games and on forums, that a ‘ban’ typically implied that it was permanent, or for a considerable amount of time, like multiple weeks or a month or more, or until removed from a banlist.
If a ban was temporary, it would be qualified by clarifying that it was a temporary ban.
Otherwise, just using ‘ban’ almost always meant a permanent ban.
A ‘kick’, on the other hand, usually meant direct ejection from a game in the moment, and maybe 15 or 30 minutes of inability to rejoin, or an inability to rejoin that temporary session… though the terminology varied more from forum to forum.
This was just the common lingo used by many earlier games and forums in their own code, in their own technical documentation for server administration.
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Likewise, ‘pm’ (private message) became ‘dm’ (direct message).
I’m pretty sure Discord is entirely responsible for that.
They started calling private chats ‘direct messages’ even though basically every forum or what have you up till Discord called them ‘private chats’ or ‘private messages’.
EDIT: Evidently Twitter actually started this trend 2 years before Discord, I did not know this as I have hated the concept of Twitter since its inception and never used it =P
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‘Mods’ / ‘Modding’ / ‘Modder’, as in game mods, used to exclusively mean that you (and others, in a multiplayer game) were using or creating additional community content that altered game mechanics, almost always in a constructive way that added to the game experience for everyone.
‘
Warez’ / ‘Cheats’ / ‘Hacks’ used to specifically refer to … things that are arguably, technically ‘Mods’, but manipulate your experience of the game to give you a (theoretically) covert series of advantages over the game such that competiton is now blatantly unfair.Those terms are still used to mean that… but, as less and less games support modding, and more and more switched away from having server browsers to just having a ‘find match’ button… with a whole lot of those kinds of games, ‘Modding’ now just means cheating or hacking.
If you got to a GTA V game or community and say ‘I’m a modder’ they will interperet that as ‘I am a cheater’, not ‘I make and have made mods for one or many PC games.’
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All of these newer uses of the terms are still ‘correct’ in the sense that you can justify the meanings of the newer terms, its not like they’re misnomers…
… but a lot of zoomers / casuals have little to no understanding of how the terminology changes are confusing to an older gamer who finds themselves in a community of younger folks.
I’ve always felt like “ban” is more like a manual operarion, you’re banned until someone manually unbans you. While a kick or suspension expires on its own.
Thank you! Your thorough and thoughtful response is a breath of fresh air.
Autistic elder gamer (I’m 35 rofl) at your service lol.
I reformatted my post and added a bit to it.
But yeah… its not that the newer terms / usage of terms is like, objectively incorrect.
It is that language is actually nowhere near as objective and unchanging as most people seem to think, and words have a whole bunch of connotations and implied meanings that most people don’t even realize they are taking for granted.
Ban just means you are not allowed to do something. You can add a qualifier to note how long it is but on its own, there is no implied timeframe, it could be short or long no problem. A permanent ban means explicitly it will not be lifted after a certain period of time.
A suspension means that you stop doing something but you could expect to restart. In most contexts this is on a temporary basis, but you can specify an “indefinite suspension”, which practically is the same as a permanent ban, but perhaps connotating greater chance to appeal it or some conditions that may occur at an indeterminate point that would lift the suspension.
there is no implied timeframe
If it’s not implied that it ever ends, how long would it last? Forever seems the reasonable answer. And as far as I know that was the prevailing assumption until 20ish years ago. I’m asking how and why that changed.
I think you misread their response. It’d be similar to ask “How long does a timeout last” - it depends on the time affixed to the state - timeouts have no inherently defined length.
I think
banin the tech world was originally understood to be permanent - but in the real world ban has always had the flexibility to have an assigned term. As the internet has grown it seems that ban is gradually returning to being non-permanent though a lot of systems will still differentiate between a ban (permanent) and a suspension (temporary) - though, again, there are instances I’ve seen of “Account permanently Suspended.”A Time-out has Time in the word itself.
The definition also explicitly mentions a limited time, and uses the word Suspension that I already showed means temporary.
Right. Often times when something is banned, it is usually banned “until further notice” hence permanent or indeterminate length, but not always. It’s the qualifier that will specify whether a ban is temporary or not.
The Prohibition Era was a time when alcohol was banned indefinitely, until it was repealed. Campfire bans generally are only during the season when the risk of fire is high or are disallowed during specific times of day, and those have been around for a while. Being grounded is a ban on going anywhere until a kid meets their parents’ wishes or after a certain time. Temporary parking restrictions for a special event or snow clearing have been around pre-internet and those are called parking bans. It’s not the ban itself that means permanent, even if there were a lot more uses of it meaning “until further notice”, than for a specific length. You could say that the usage of ban qualified with a specific time expiry is more common now than it did before, but I would argue it did exist in the past. Why that is, I could only guess.
I can go check a 20 year old dictionary in a few weeks when I visit family over the holidays and I can check if there’s a significantly different definition.
Nothing in the definition of ban says it has to be permanent.
Nothing implies it’s anything other than permanent. While Suspend explicitly defines itself as a temporary Ban.
The difference between ban and suspend isn’t a temporal difference. Here’s the Cambridge dictionary definition of “suspend”:
to stop something from being active, either temporarily or permanently (see: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/suspend)
Here’s the definition for “ban”:
to forbid (= refuse to allow) something, especially officially (see https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/ban?q=Ban)
The difference between the two is the subject: an active process or service can be suspended, but something specific (e.g. an action, object or person) can be banned. Ban also implies a more official act in order to punish someone or prevent something (Johnny was banned from entering the bus), whereas a suspension doesn’t necessarily have that ‘negative’ context (e.g. the bus service was suspended, which doesn’t imply this happened because the bus driver was drunk or something).
In a more Lemmy-specific context, you could say you suspended someone’s access to the platform, or that you banned them from the platform. Neither way of saying it implies anything about the duration. You can’t however really say you suspended someone from the platform, that doesn’t really work.
In this context, I think the direct implication that a ban is handed out because someone did something bad is a lot clearer than when you use the word suspension. Because of that I believe ban to be the more context-appropriate word here. Suspend does not carry that connotation as something can be suspended for a whole host of reasons, none of which have to be related to rule-breaking. For example, federation with another instance could be suspended temporarily until the other instance does (or doesn’t do) something that is required for technical reasons.
“Permaban” is the word you’re looking for.
I’m pretty sure Permaban only exists because people started using Ban as temporary.
Permaban is redundant.Back in my day we had both tempbans and permabans as two types of ban. If you wanted to explicitly specify, you’d use one of those terms.
It’s not redundant to have more specific terms. Assumptions like yours are exactly why disambiguation is useful.
Maybe my day is older than yours.
I think statistically that’s likely.
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To my mind, Ban has always meant permanent.
Then explain perma-ban
Joke aside though - ban is a toggle. You can toggle something on or off, but it usually implies something temporary. You can then manually unban someone at a later date, or have the unban be automated in some cases.
“I turned the lights on” - there is no expectation that you never turn them off again
“It is snowing outside” - at some point it will stop snowing
“I’m banned from my local book club for repeatedly asking if they made a movie for that one” - this too shall pass. Maybe in 4 years when I go back they’ll forgive me and let me back in, and by that time I’ll have watched Moby Dick - manual toggle of the ban back to ‘off’ is expected here.
“I was banned from Day9’s stream for backseating” - here the ban would have an automatic limit, maybe something like a million seconds.
Perma-ban started being used because people began using Ban when meaning something temporary.
