I've had this idea before, and I think it could be helpful in some cases where a user has done something slightly wrong, but it may not require a full ban on everything.

So for example, a user who spams uploading a lot of saves, we can ban them from uploading for some time. They are just being annoying, but can't actively cause harm if they can't upload. Same with a user who puts a lot of bad tags, we'll just block them from placing tags for a month or something. Tags aren't very critical to playing the game, so they'll be able to do everything else still.

In most cases though, we do want to actually ban people. Like your racism example. You uploaded a save with dumb stereotypes and essentially the n-word, and were banned for it. This deserved a full account ban. If the result is "less interest in playing TPT", then the ban worked perfectly. We don't want this kind of behavior in TPT. If all we did was block you from uploading saves for 2 days, you wouldn't learn any lesson.

@stargate38 (View Post)
Shadowbanning isn't a good idea for normal users. It's only good for spambots. We do have a spambot problem, but I don't think any normal user has seen much of it, because they only put spam on their own profiles (and sometimes on the forums). So I could shadowban those bots, but it's unlikely to help.

For normal users, it's important to let them know why they are banned. Otherwise you won't see any behavior change. They'll just keep doing the thing that got them shadowbanned.