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?
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.
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.