>>I actually even wrote you a PM when I noticed...

Watching closely over the years, M seems most likely to ban permanently or semi-permanently if there's a breach of site rules, e.g. stirring up trouble using a fake account, or speech that could get you in trouble in the real, e.g. threats to commit violence. One poster disappeared after he challenged his opponent to a sword-fighting duel, another after interpersonal sparring descended into homophobic obscenity. Apart from that, in exasperation M seems to award a cooling-off period if there's protest at the behavior of one or two posters, often pinging both on the grounds that "it takes two to tango" especially if both parties declare they'll never back down.

Things certainly got heated in these threads but also some of us were reminded that mdot can make a performance difference depending on selected cursor, we saw a clever technique to cope with temporary ODBC outage and we saw helpful performance analysis from multiple contributors. So not all bad. Once things cool down, historically you'd expect to see people back and definitely there are prior instances of people banned more than once who made comebacks, presumably after private commitments to M. Historically M has kept all of this very private, even after some posters mounted proxy campaigns via other regulars to pressurize M or try to blame others.