Quoting Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com:
On Nov 27, 2007 8:59 AM, joshua.zelinsky@yale.edu wrote:
Now, there are a variety of other techniques that can be used to find banned users and taken together with those they are often effective. However, we shouldn't simply use evidence prior experience with Wikipedia as a good reason to assume someone is a banned returning user.
Indeed. The correct behavior is probably to email the user privately about your concerns and give them a chance to address them. If that doesn't work, getting a mutually trusted third party to act as an intermediary might be a good idea.
-Matt
No. While that on occasion make sense, very often additional evidence is by itself sufficient. For example, some users have certain grammatical quirks and spelling issues. For example I frequently write "payed" when the word is in fact "paid". Without going into too much detail (not wanting to give banned users too much info here) such signs when used with other evidence can be very definitive. In such cases a sanity check from another admin might be a good thing, but very often there's no need to email the user.